The Reverend Francis Kilvert, whose famous Diary is currently being featured on television, died a hundred years ago, in September 1879. The Diary contains a number of entries relating to mental disorder, occurring for the most part among his parishioners at Clyro in Powis and Bredwardine in Herefordshire, on the Welsh borders, and at Langley Burrell in Wiltshire, but in one or two instances within his own family.

The College has recommended that the WHO Glossary of psychiatric terms should be in general use with the 9th International Classification of Diseases and has asked that the Department of Health and Social Security should support its being made available to all grades of psychiatric staff. (It is hoped in this way to achieve greater consistency in the recording of psychiatric diagnoses on form HMR 1 (Psych. I/P) for the purposes of the Mental Health Enquiry.) The Department of Health and Social Security issued a general letter on 5 April 1979, Ref. SRF/2/88 in which they stated: ‘It is hoped that hospital administrations will find it possible to make copies of the glossary available to all grades of psychiatric staff and to administrative and clerical staff in psychiatric records departments’. Copies of the Glossary, which replaces the previous WHO booklet on the 8th Revision of the ICD, are available from HMSO. The price is £4.20 per copy for orders of less than 50 copies; there is a discount on large orders.

This Conference was held at the Scientific Societies Lecture Theatre, Savile Row, London on 5th February 1979. The President, Professor D. A. Pond, was in the Chair.

Modern medical education in India began in 1822 in a medical school at Calcutta, but postgraduate medical education started much later. It was restricted to two or three medical colleges at the beginning of this century and was confined to a few specialties such as medicine, surgery and midwifery. Where such qualifications existed, very few students enrolled. Today more than 80 out of a total of 107 medical colleges have facilities for postgraduate training in sixteen broad specialties and over a dozen sub-specialties such as cardiology, nephrology and aviation medicine.