In the mid-19th century, the Commissioners in Lunacy continued the direction of the earlier reform movements, but depended upon local magistrates for the execution of their ideas. The early development of a single county asylum is described from its beginnings, as are some of the personalities involved.

Among his various approaches to an understanding of schizophrenic inheritance, whether dominant or recessive, Rüdin (1916) also compared the respective frequencies of one-sided and two-sided familial taint. Essen-Möller (1949) tried the idea on another sample, but neither of us arrived at a definite choice. Lateron Slater (1966) surprisingly demonstrated that unilaterality is typical not only of dominant but also of polygenic transmission. In the present paper we adjust Slater's computation and, in so doing, accentuate his result. We also find a similar preponderance of unilaterality on a recessive model, and offer an explanation for this. The findings substantially reduce the efficacy of laterality of taint as an indicator of mode of inheritance.

Psychiatry and psychopharmacology are no longer aiming to make a decisive breakthrough at the end of the century. Rather than seeking explanations, research workers are looking for ‘predictions’. Three main types of prediction are emerging: a tautological, a heuristic, and an irrelevant one. Few predictions found in the recent literature can be marked as ‘logical’ ones. Nevertheless, predictions play two important roles: they generate new hypotheses that can be falsified in properly designed scientific experiments; they also may serve to falsify given hypotheses. The main recent findings on predictions in psychiatry are briefly summarised.