A leading child psychoanalyst, Cecil Todes studied under Anna Freud, though he disagreed with her method of passing patients on to students.
But he became equally well known for his battle against Parkinson's disease, which was diagnosed when he was 41.
He battled against it with gruelling and ground-breaking treatments, including drugs, acupuncture and foetal cell implants in his brain.
His book, Shadow Over My Brain (1990), which has been translated into German, Italian and other languages, provides a unique insight into the disease from the perspective of both doctor and patient. He also wrote papers on depression and psychosomatic illness.
Cecil attributed his innate sympathy with children's suffering to the loss of his mother, who died when he was six. The son of Lithuanian immigrants to South Africa, he qualified in dentistry at Witwatersrand University but switched to medicine.
He was one of a group of school friends, including Mark Weinberg and Sidney Lipworth - both later knighted - from King Edward's School in Johannesburg, who emigrated in the 1950s as the Nationalist Party entrenched its apartheid policy.
He completed his medical training at the West London Hospital while practising as a dental locum, then went to Harvard University and worked in Boston City Hospital. He married his second wife, Lili Loebl, in New York 1964.
They returned to England, where Dr Todes worked on his specialism, child psychiatry, at the Tavistock Clinic, becoming head of the Paddington Centre for Psychotherapy. He believed in keeping children in a familiar environment, whether school or clinic, with the same practitioners.
He was admired for his enjoyment of life and refusal to give up, though he was forced into early retirement in his mid-50s, largely through the attitudes of his professional colleagues.
He eventually found his most effective therapies in physical movement, with a popmobility group and a potter's wheel, as rehabilitation after a heart attack. Aged 61, he cycled in the London to Brighton bike ride.
He is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.