This report describes a clinical trial in which pericyazine and chlorpromazine were used with 45 disturbed patients resident in a hospital for the mentally subnormal. The patients, who comprised a clinically heterogeneous sample, were randomly allocated by the hospital pharmacist to two major groups; in one, half the patients were given pericyazine for a 12-week period and an inert preparation for a further 12-week period while the remaining patients had the inert preparation during the first period and pericyazine during the second. In the other group, which was given chlorpromazine, the same procedure was followed. Prior to the trial proper, there was a six-week period during which all drugs except anti-convulsants were tapered off. All preparations were in syrup form and were indistinguishable from each other by taste or smell. Only the pharmacist was aware of what syrup a given patient received.

In 1965 the Education Committee drew up a questionnaire on postgraduate teaching (prepared in a form suitable for I.B.M. punching) which was then circulated to every psychiatric hospital, psychiatric unit and teaching hospital in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, and to those hospitals abroad recognized by the Conjoint Board as providing training for the D.P.M. The questionnaires were sent out late in 1965, and after two sets of reminders the returned results were processed by the Tabulating Research Centre at Hampstead. Regrettably, the Centre, although providing a great deal of information very quickly, delayed for almost a year completing the processing of the data.

The practice of making routine serological tests for syphilis on all admissions is carried on in many mental hospitals, but no assessment of the advantage of this procedure at the present time seems to have been reported. Rosahn (1958), viewing the matter from the laboratories of a general hospital, concluded that syphilis was still a sufficiently important disease to justify routine screening tests. Bell (1959) studied the admissions in a 12-month period to a large Canadian general hospital He pointed out that some previous figures (Editorial, J. Amer. med. Ass., 1957), based on total numbers of positive reactors, did not give a realistic measure of the value of the testing procedure, and he attempted to determine the proportion of admission screening tests which were of practical significance, in that the clinicians concerned were led to initiate treatment as a result of them. He found a “useful discovery rate” (discounting two patients who he thought might well have had elective serology performed in any case) of 0·03 per cent.