Formerly Consultant Psychiatrist at St Bartholomew's and Hackney Hospitals

Ruth was born in North London on 20 December 1943, into a large, radical Jewish family. Her father, Sigmund, was a well-known left-wing lawyer, and her mother, Connie, a political activist. Reportedly very noisy and hospitable, the Seifert household produced four energetic siblings, Ruth's three brothers excelling in law and academe, and her sister becoming a leading head teacher.

Ruth attended Camden School for Girls and then went to Guy's Hospital Medical School, marrying Charles Clarke, a neurologist (and Everest mountaineer), in 1971. At the time, she was a senior house officer in psychiatry at Guy's, but moved on to the Maudsley & Bethlem Royal Joint Hospital in 1973, where she completed her postgraduate training. A major influence at the Maudsley was Dr Denis Leigh, a wise and practical physician/psychiatrist of the old school, who wore a white coat and enjoined comprehensive clinical management and a personalised approach to managing chronic neuroses.

Ruth's stay at the Maudsley was prolonged by having her first daughter Rebecca in 1973 and her second, Naomi, in 1976. Their presence in the hospital canteen, with Ruth (as often as not Gauloise in mouth) declaiming loudly, was one of the joys of training there in the 1970s. Moving to Barts and Hackney (the in-patient psychiatric unit was based at the latter) in 1980, after initially working as a locum, Ruth took on one of the most demanding clinical posts in London.

Until her retirement in 1998, taken early because of her despair at the repetitive changes of NHS management, Ruth worked often single-handedly to provide a proper service. Hackney Hospital, with its five acute wards stacked up in ‘F Block’, was a Victorian infirmary workhouse, decried as a ‘rat-pit’, intermittently affected by clostridial infections, and sitting on a network of tunnels and outbuildings in which patients would get lost. Never designed as a psychiatric facility (prior to 1974, patients from Hackney had been taken off to traditional asylums such as Long Grove, Epsom) it nevertheless fostered a spirit of practical ‘do what you can’ care that was epitomised by Ruth. She spent time very much on the front line, in the ward, working with patients and carers, a stark contrast to a number of more ‘detached’ colleagues.

During this period, Ruth became MRCPsych (1975) and FRCPsych (1988), and was Deputy Chairman of the Barts Medical Council between 1988 and 1990, becoming Regional Advisor to North East Thames between 1993 and 1997. She was a leading light for women in psychiatry, and for the ‘Save Barts’ Campaign, and was so trusted by medical colleagues that she became very much the ‘consultant's consultant’, helping a succession of surgeons and physicians (and their partners) through the usual crises of workaholic lifestyles. Her firm was the most popular among all the students, who delighted in her practical knowledge, her foul language (equivalent to the fruitier conversations of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore) and her wonderful sense of humour.

Ruth was not an academic, but she wrote up several case reports, was an invaluable second opinion across the clinical spectrum and had (unsurprisingly given her family background) a sharp legal brain. Her judgement of people, personalities and policies was invaluable, despising the phoney and the lubricious but standing by even the most demanding of patients.

Away from work, Ruth was an enthusiastic hostess and cook, opera- and cinema-goer, and delighted in taking her secretary and nursing colleagues to tea at the Ritz. Her household was always full of people, children, dogs, and animated conversation. Diagnosed with widespread breast cancer a year after retirement, she nevertheless continued an active travelling life, with her husband, taking her illness with resigned good humour, and absolute apparent fearlessness at the thought of death and a lasting distrust towards all forms of religion. Sceptical about yet another bout of chemotherapy, she subsequently thanked the care team because it had enabled her to see her two grandchildren born, but not to survive long enough to have to change their nappies.

Ruth was an inspiration to several generations of psychiatrists in North London, and Hackney in particular. She created a zeitgeist of personal relationships and attitudes to patients and staff that was principled, personal, committed, and against any kind of humbug or political correctness. Her radical, funny and life-loving personality was summed up in the music at her heroically definitively secular funeral: there was the Internationale, and Gracie Fields' ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’.

She leaves her husband, her daughters Rebecca and Naomi, and two grandchildren, Sepu, a Tibetan terrier, and a wide devoted family.