The literature on the purely psychiatric aspects of mental handicap is remarkably limited. In the third edition of Mayer-Gross, Slater and Roth's Clinical Psychiatry, apart from one or two brief incidental mentions elsewhere in the text, the main references consist of just one paragraph on psychoses and two short paragraphs on neuroses included in the section on ‘The Association of Mental Subnormality with Other Syndromes’! Similarly the only reference to mental illness in mental handicap in the eighth edition of Henderson and Gillespie's Text-Book of Psychiatry was a mere four lines on psychosis; by the ninth edition, this had grown to seven lines covering both neuroses and psychoses, but with two of those lines devoted to an admission by the authors of their own lack of knowledge.