Practically all the material in this book is presented in numerical form. Such indices stand for real and important characteristics of personal condition and social environment, and we would reject the suggestion that is sometimes made (fortunately rather rarely) that they are meaningless abstractions. We have deliberately chosen to make our investigation in this way because we do not think that the most animated and evocative description by the most perceptive participant observers could possibly answer the questions we set ourselves. We do not, of course, discount their value, but they have another purpose and are complementary to the present approach.

In this chapter we shall try to give life to some of our figures and to illustrate some of the processes they measure, by means of an account of three particular wards. Two of them cater for severely-handicapped patients, but they represented different stages in the progress from the old-fashioned kindly but deadening ‘back’ ward to the modern ‘therapeutic community’. There was no ward in any of the three hospitals which was equivalent to that described by L. Wing (1956) and Folkard (1956)—where gallons of paraldehyde were dispensed weekly and the ‘padded room’ still existed as a possible means of seclusion. Our three hospitals, in 1960, were even farther away, of course, from the days when physical means of restraint, such as anklets, straps or strait-jackets, were used. Such techniques have fortunately been less common in British hospitals than elsewhere, but were never really necessary, as Conolly pointed out over a hundred years ago (1856).