It has been shown (Wing and Giddens 1959, Wing 1960) that schizophrenics may benefit from a course at a Ministry of Labour Industrial Rehabilitation Unit. Psychiatric cases make “special demands on the staff time” (Ministry of Labour Gazette 1962) and if they comprise too high a proportion, may alter the atmosphere of the Unit from “industrial” to “hospital”. There follows a need for limitation by selection of such cases. Selection procedures however have not been fully worked out (Wing 1960).

The present work is a psychiatric cytogenetic study of a patient with “pure gonadal dysgenesis”. This term was first used by Harnden and Stewart (1959), but Swyer (1955) had already drawn attention to the clinical condition of a tall female with hypogonadal signs, amenorrhoea and poorly developed secondary sex characteristics, and Hoffenberg et al. (1957) had described two tall patients with gonadal dysgenesis and recognized this as a variant of Turner's Syndrome because of the normal stature and lack of congenital malformations; they termed it gonadal dysgenesis in the normal-looking female.

It is generally believed that anorexia nervosa is due to an abnormal attitude of mind which results in an insufficient intake of food. As the term anorexia nervosa implies, many patients experience a loss of appetite, but sometimes this is not so, and vomiting is an alternative or additional device adopted by the patient to ensure a reduction in effective food intake. As a rule the patient induces vomiting by tickling her throat with her fingers, but sooner or later she becomes so proficient at vomiting that mechanical stimulation is no longer necessary. Nevertheless one should not assume that vomiting in anorexia nervosa is always under the control of the patient's will. In the patient described below vomiting became intractable and was found to be due to a physical disorder—acute dilatation of the stomach. Such a complication occurring in a severely undernourished patient is highly dangerous unless recognized early and treated effectively. The opportunity was taken to measure water absorption and gastric motility.

Oxypertine (also known as Win. 18,501–2) is a member of a series of alkyl indolyl-4-phenyl piperazines (Archer et al., 1962), and is 1-[2-(5,6 -Dimethoxy-2-methyl-3-indolyl) ethyl]-4-phenylpiperazine.

A number of observations have been published with regard to elevated serum uric acid levels in patients with atherosclerotic (Eidlitz, 1961, 1962) and coronary disease (Gertler, Garn and Levine, 1951) and hyperuricaemia after myocardial infarction (Dreyfuss, 1959; Kohn and Prozan, 1959). Work has also been done on dominant traits for hyperuricaemia together with hypercholesterolaemia (Adlersberg, 1949; Harris-Jones, 1957; Salvini and Verdi, 1959; Schoenfeld and Goldberger, 1963). A greater incidence of cardiovascular diseases among gouty patients than among others has been noted (Gertler and Oppenheimer, 1953), as well as a tendency for spontaneous changes in the serum cholesterol level to be associated with changes of similar direction and magnitude in the serum uric acid level (Schoenfeld and Goldberger, 1963). In view of all these observations, an investigation was undertaken to ascertain whether the serum uric acid levels change with dietary fat composition as do the serum cholesterol levels.

For a series of 972 first admissions of functional psychoses admitted to Gaustad Hospital between 1938 and 1950 a long-term clinical follow-up has been carried out. The prognostic importance of clinical, social and genetic factors was analysed in great detail (1).