CLASSIFICATION, CLINICOPATHOLOGICAL CORRELATIONS, AND FUNCTIONAL-ORGANIC OVERLAP In this millennial issue, I shall recall some of the issues in the psychiatry of old age that were current in England half a century ago, based on my experiences at the Maudsley Hospital, Graylingwell, Stockholm, and Newcastle. In 1946, Aubrey Lewis, then Professor of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital, lamented that while the numbers of old people being admitted to mental hospitals had steadily increased, the clinical psychiatry of old age was neglected (Lewis, 1946). Classification was in a state of confusion. Senile and vascular degenerations characterized the aging brain, and though affective and paranoid states occurred, they were widely regarded as depressive and paranoid forms of senile psychosis and not clearly distinguished from purely functional states. In the presence of degenerative changes in the brains of normal old people and the apparent lack of a clear quantitative relationship between clinical severity and neuropathology, the presence or absence of symptoms was determined by the premorbid personality and the ability to resist the effects of the cerebral changes (Rothschild, 1937).