The keen pleasure I felt when I was invited to deliver this lecture arose not only from the honour which it conferred, but also because it offered an opportunity to link again the lecture founded in Henry Maudsley's memory with the hospital which is the living witness to his wisdom and generosity. The first Maudsley Lecture was given by Sir James Crichton Browne, a contemporary and friend of Maudsley; the second was given at the Maudsley Hospital by Sir Frederick Mott, who had seen much of him during the last decade of his life. Since then very few of those called to give this lecture had had any personal contact with him, and it seems appropriate that now, a hundred years after Maudsley entered University College Hospital as an apprentice, when he has become for most of us a shadowy figure of the Victorian past, I should attempt to revive the memory of what he did during his life and consider how his work lives on after him—most of all in the hospital and school where I, and so many more, have the privilege of working. Before I do this I would like to recall that on the list of Maudsley lecturers there is the name of Edward Mapother, a man singularly close to Maudsley in temperament and outlook, who carried forward the Maudsley Hospital in the spirit of its Founder's intention, and who would have been ideally fitted, in the 1939 lecture entrusted to him, to deal with the theme I am entering upon; unfortunately the war and his failing health came between, and Prof. Mapother never delivered the lecture. Sir James Crichton Browne compared Maudsley with Mercier; I compare Maudsley with Mapother, and recognize that in each generation there are men of rare gifts, severe in self-discipline, with strong and consistent purpose, who, in psychiatry as in other fields, accomplish much good and leave behind a lasting memorial.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the value, especially over the five colder months, of the peripheral vasodilator, benzyl imidazoline (Priscol, Ciba) in the care of the circulatory disorders of the aged.

In 1933 Potter expressed the opinion that a careful psychiatric study of patients in institutions for mental defectives “might demonstrate that schizophrenia in children is not as rare as is now generally believed.” Similarly in 1938 O. Lay wrote: “It is possible that many cases exist in institutions for the feebleminded, in which the disorders have been assumed to have existed from birth, and that a close examination would reveal that in the earliest years the patient's development was normal.”

Modern psychiatry has developed in Western Europe, largely under French and German aegis, and latterly in the United States. It is pertinent to ask, since it deals with human behaviour in all its variety, if the concepts, working principles and empirically derived conclusions of psychiatry possess universal validity, wherever it might be practised. As one instance of the influence of cultural environment on psychiatric symptomatology (and also psychiatric practice), we may point to the “hysterogenic points “so often found in French hysterics by the Salpêtrière school of neurologists, who could provoke an hysterical attack or sometimes abort one by pressing on these points. Just across the Channel in England, among English hysterics, these phenomena could not be reproduced; they were, of course, special features of the disease, exhibited only in the atmosphere created by Charcot and his colleagues at that period. The psychiatrist in cultures farther removed from the civilization of Western Europe may well have reason to pause and ask if the principles and practice of orthodox psychiatry possess the same degree of truth or usefulness elsewhere than in Western Europe or America.

Written language is a complex function; being built on the spoken word it has to draw on a variety of subsidiary functions which have to be unified in one particular skill. Moreover, the subsidiary functions are not the same for reading and writing; in reading, visual-gnostic factors are of major importance, in writing, special skill of hand and finger is required.

Since the introduction of penicillin into therapeutics the important question of the penetration of the blood-brain barrier by the antibiotic in infections of the nervous system has cropped up. In vital staining experiments Goldman (1913) observed that the acid semi-colloidal dye, trypan blue, which makes its way from the blood into the tissues, is unable to penetrate into the central nervous system. When the dye was injected into the cerebrospinal fluid it passed without difficulty into the brain substance. These observations were later verified by other investigators and have been verified for other substances (dyes, drugs, toxins, etc.).

Tridione is established as by far the most powerful drug in the control of petit mal. Many of its clinical aspects, therapeutic as well as toxic, are as yet not clear. In spite of this there is a remarkable absence of reports on the use of it in controlled clinical experiments.

During recent years there has been a revival of interest in the possible role of the adrenal cortex in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

This case has been recorded because it seems to be the first in which E.C.T. has been given to a patient with a skull defect repaired by means of a large metal plate. It is also of interest because there was some doubt about the diagnosis, although this was resolved by the response to treatment.

In this paper I propose to describe three varieties of behaviour of patients under treatment by means of ether abreaction.

The a-b ridge count, called the a-b count for short, is the number of epidermal ridges crossing or touching a fine straight line drawn joining the triradii a and b on the palm. The triradial point, or the radiant when the former is absent, is not included in the count. It was pointed out in a previous work (Fang, 1949) that, on the assumption that university students are more intelligent than the general population, there is a consistent increase of the mean a-b count with intelligence. The results of the present study seem to agree with this finding.