The promotion of interest in research has long been one of the objectives of psychiatric training, reaching its zenith in the now defunct academic DPM. The successor, the MRCPsych, has retained a research option even though the main stress is on clinical and scientific knowledge. The 1980 Handbook for Trainees and Inceptors noted that “The aim of the research option is to encourage trainees to acquire more searching and critical approaches and to foster interest in clinical data, literature, the teaching of psychiatric practice, and research.” Although the option has been used by “only a relatively small number of people”, who have as a rule been “exceptionally able and energetic candidates”, it has been retained in the newest version of the examination.

After some 13 years of pale-faced exile in England I returned with some excitement to Australia, eager to share in its psychiatric development and perhaps to benefit a little from the fruits of what appears as the international rapacity of Murdoch, Holmes a Court, Elders IXL et al. The second more furtive wish suffered early set-backs as I discovered that the Australian economy was dipping alarmingly and that the Australian dollar, once to my mind as solid as Ayer's Rock, was sinking rather than floating against other currencies. This has meant cut-backs in government expenditure, health included, threatening my first wish as well.

The cities of Bristol and Bath have played an eminent role in the history of mental handicap.

Unfortunately, documentation is rather scanty, particularly on the pre and post Reformation era but much more is known about the Holy Cross Hospital in Bath, perhaps the oldest mental handicap hospital in Great Britain. The Romans contributed to its foundations when they built Fossway Road on the outskirts of Bath which the pilgrims later used to visit Glastonbury.

Child and adolescent psychiatry is a relatively new sub-speciality and it is only recently that its practitioners have started to examine the problems of teaching it on the undergraduate curriculum. Questions about when it is best taught during the undergraduate years and what constitutes a core curriculum are still contentious. Indeed some psychiatrists have yet to be convinced that it should be taught at all at an undergraduate level.

‘The number in each room rarely, if ever, exceeded ten. Here, I generally found several of the patients engaged in some useful or amusing employment. Every class seemed to form a little family … I incline to think, that the probability of recovery is greater, where a moderate number of patients associate together … I incline to think the number ought in no case to exceed fifteen’.

The General Medical Council published Recommendations on Basic Medical Education in which the principles of the Pre-registration House Officer post were updated. An important provision was the acceptance of a variety of combinations of posts including four months in general medicine, four months in general surgery and four months in another clinical hospital discipline or in a health centre.