ABSTRACT
I PRESENT this brief paper diffidently, because of the lapse of time-over 20 years-since the material was obtained.
In 1932 I began to collect information about patients who showed ‘con jugal psychoses’ and about their offspring. The offspring, however, were in so many instances still young that I thought no statistical legerdemain could be a substitute for patience and complete data such as might be obtained by waiting another ten years, i.e. until 1943, then re-establishing contact with the offspring; and if necessary repeating the process in 1953, by which time almost all the children would have passed the age of risk. However I reckoned with out my host: in 1943 we were all otherwise engaged and when I tried to pick up the threads, more recently, I found that in the interval the disruption of communities because of bombing and movements of population, had put it out of my power to find the people again. Searching the central register of all persons admitted to the mental hospitals of England and Wales presented another possible way of discovering the psychotic offspring, but women who had married in the ensuing twenty odd years were untraceable because of the change of surname, and there were other technical difficulties in identifying individuals.
