Mary Larney Hansen, physician

In the 1970s, Dr. Mary Hansen would learn ahead of time what soap opera fans across the nation would have hungered to know — what was up next on All My Children and One Life to Live.

"She was a close personal friend of Agnes Nixon," the Main Line creator and script writer of both daytime shows, Dr. Hansen's daughter, Barbara Carper, said.

"Agnes would send her the scripts and she would read through them and verify their medical accuracy."

It was not a staff position, but, Carper said, "it was a fun thing, fun for me to brag about it."

Her mother "was very quiet, very reserved," Carper said. "I doubt she told anyone."

Dr. Mary Larney Hansen, 90, a psychiatrist at Haverford State Hospital until she retired in 1989, died of sepsis on Saturday, June 9, at Bryn Mawr Terrace, where she had lived since moving from her Penn Valley home in 2010.

Dr. Hansen visited the New York City set of the soap operas only once, Carper said, and the reason was right beside her.

"Probably I wanted to go," Carper said, because it would be "fun to see that kind of stuff."

One Life to Live began airing in 1968 and All My Children in 1970. Both were canceled in 2011.

Dr. Hansen grew up in Penn Valley and was valedictorian of the 1938 graduating class at Lower Merion High School.

She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1945, one of the few women in her graduating class, Carper said.

Dr. Hansen was a staff psychiatrist at Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital in the 1940s and at Philadelphia State Hospital in the same decade, her daughter said.

After absenting herself from the workplace to raise her children, Dr. Hansen in the 1960s joined her psychiatrist husband, A. Victor Hansen Jr., on the staff at Haverford State Hospital, where he was clinical director. She was a staff psychiatrist there until she retired in 1989.

Dr. Hansen and her husband were founding members in the 1970s of the Pennsylvania Association of State Mental Hospital Physicians, which she served as secretary.

In addition to her daughter, Dr. Hansen is survived by sons Victor E. and Christopher; and five grandchildren. Her husband died in 2006.

A memorial service was planned for an undetermined date and place.