Cedric Howell Swanton was educated at Scotch College, Melbourne, and Melbourne University. After early marriage he did postgraduate work in Edinburgh and London, originally directed towards a surgical career, and gained the FRCSE. Returning to Australia he set up in general practice in suburban Sydney. Within four years, however, he was sufficiently intrigued by the psychological problems of his patients to seek psychiatric training. He again went to London, studied at the Tavistock Clinic and gained the London DPM.

In 1937 he returned to Sydney and set up in consultant psychiatric practice. He was appointed to the honorary staff of the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, serving in that capacity for some twenty-two years until his mandatory retirement to the consultant staff at the age of sixty. He concurrently held honorary appointments at the Women's Hospital (Crown Street), the Eastern Suburbs Hospital and the Northcott Neurological Diagnostic Centre. He was elected president of the Australian Association of Psychiatrists in 1958 and was awarded the FRACP as a mark of distinction in 1962. In 1965 he was elected a foundation Fellow of the newly formed Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists.

Respected both within his specialty and in the profession generally, his opinion was often sought by other doctors. He had an extensive private practice and gave much time to his honorary and teaching duties. He had contacts with various foci of power in Sydney and in his later years enjoyed playing an influential role in some areas of medico-academic politics. He had a major part in securing the appointment of the late David Maddison to the unexpectedly vacant chair of psychiatry in the University of Sydney, although Maddison had just accepted a chair in the University of Adelaide.

In this, Swanton demonstrated one of his more public traits - an old fashioned, mildly xenophobic Australian nationalism leading him to press for the appointment of a local, if inexperienced, graduate, rather than that of an imported academic. Yet despite his dour, somewhat abrasive manner, Swanton paradoxically was an immensely kind, sensitive and just man; one of his successful psychiatric proteges was the late Stephen Benedek, who had come to Sydney pre-war as a refugee from Hungary.

Swanton's early psychiatric training must have been largely along psychoanalytic lines at the Tavistock Clinic. In his later years, however, he became an unapologetic proponent of empirical physical methods of treatment in psychiatry. His teaching was precise, clinically oriented and distrustful of theory. He was noted for his pithy aphoristic style. One of the first to use ECT in Sydney, he continued to apply it intensively and extensively in treating his patients. He delighted in constructing and modifying his own apparatus. He also was enthusiastic in his recommendation of leucotomy. The revolution in psychiatric practice following the introduction of effective tranquillising and antidepressant drugs came too late in his career to modify his views and he remained sceptical of their efficacy.

He was a man of simple tastes and in later life a major recreation was fishing, despite the inhibitions imposed by angina. It was returning from one such solitary expedition that he suddenly collapsed and died.