There is an increasingly evident and urgent need for child psychiatrists to scrutinize, to clarify and to communicate the nature of the task in which they are professionally engaged. This point is cogently made for the whole of psychiatry in a leading article in The Lancet entitled ‘Psychiatric Training in a Fog’. In it the author draws attention to the grave import for psychiatry of the implications of a number of recent studies. Gross deficiencies in many training programmes with respect to community work and psychotherapy have been shown by the report of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association Manpower and Education Project, by Peter Brook. Disquieting trends in the recruitment of trainees have been reported by Russell. Shepherd has emphasized the need for research in order to back up with established knowledge the expanding aims of contemporary psychiatry. All these studies, it is concluded, point to a need for a ‘fundamental assessment of the whole nature of what constitutes the practice of psychiatry’.

In his interesting account of the history of Brentry Hospital, Dr. Janear described what was done by Harold and Katherine Burden. They came to Bristol in 1895, when Mr. Burden was appointed chaplain to Horfield Prison. They had worked in the East End of London and were much influenced by the achievements of Octavia Hill. Now they turned their attention to the mentally subnormal, and Stoke Park Colony was opened in 1909. Much later, in 1933, this earlier work was furthered by Mr. Burden’s second wife, who established the Burden Mental Research Trust for the study of the causation and inheritance of normal and abnormal mentality. She also supported the foundation of the Burden Neurological Institute in 1939; its illustrious achievements have set a stamp of excellence on our national contribution to the scientific study of mental subnormality. The classical work of Professor Golia, Dr. R. M. Norman, Dr. Fraser Roberts and Dr. Grey Walter, to mention only four of the brilliant workers associated with Stoke Park and the Burden Neurological Institute, has laid solid foundations for the biological study of mental subnormality in this country. Among present workers of this group, Dr. Heaton-Ward and Dr. Janear have added their own remarkable contributions, including their textbooks on mental subnormality which have become classics in their own right.

Human conditioning is a remarkable phenomenon. I well remember the feeling of outrage I experienced at Kennedy Airport in New York when I was first frisked a mere two years ago. Nowadays, when I travel by air, at the moment I am to negotiate the last of a series of grids before reaping the reward of an actual seat on the plane, I automatically assume a cruciate position. I am no longer embarrassed, only hopeful that the frisker is sufficiently expert not to tickle and so provoke an ill-suppressed discourteous giggle. All this I rediscovered when leaving Heathrow at the start of the Study Tour of Italy on 10 May 1974.