Myre Sim, who was born in Edinburgh in 1915 and now lives in self-imposed exile in Victoria, British Columbia, is not known for meekness. He still has strong views on issues such as abortion and AIDS, and his ability to get his thoughts into print has hardly diminished with increasing age. The strength of his opinions was graphically illustrated in a recent autobiographical sketch in the Psychiatric Bulletin (Sim, 1993). This Jew, who possessed “a better than average knowledge of … Holy Writ” by the time he was 16 years old, recalled with pleasure his laying a trap for the late Eliot Slater, whose “eugenic theories … had endeared [Slater] to the Hitler regime”. No wonder so many workers felt it difficult to engage in post-war genetic research.

Gender reassignment for carefully assessed transsexual patients is now an established and accepted practice in many parts of the world. In other areas customary attitudes to those with sexual differences prevents consideration. A large number of autobiographies by reassigned patients have been published and all throw light on the experience of the writers. The one which may be recommended is that by Morris (1974). For the interested layperson enquiring about the nature of transsexualism the brief book by Hodgkinson (1987) may be recommended.

R. D. Laing was perhaps the most famous psychiatrist in the latter half of the 20th century. Yet today, for a man of such international repute, within his profession he has many detractors and few admirers. Despite his later writings on birth, his name and fame are inextricably linked with schizophrenia. For the vast majority of psychiatrists, the name of Laing today conjures up images of psychedelic irresponsibility in which parents were blamed and patients misled.