ABSTRACT
In 1933, Dr. E. D. Turner, who was then Medical Superintendent of the Royal Eastern Counties Institution, Colchester, chose Mental Deficiency as the subject for his Presidential address to the then Royal Medico-Psychological Association (now the Royal College of Psychiatrists). Dr. Turner suggested ‘The Wheel Always Turns Full Circle’ as an alternative title because, he said, ‘Over and over again, in the case of defectives during the past hundred years, it has happened that methods and ideas thought out quite early in the movement and later discarded and forgotten have been rediscovered and treated as new ideas’. This statement is as true today as when Dr. Turner made it and at a time when the present pattern of care of the mentally handicapped is being questioned, often by people with only a recent and often minimal personal involvement with the problem, it is important to consider the lessons of the past and how the present system of care, with all its admitted deficiencies, has evolved before discarding it completely in favour of a ‘new’ system which has been shown to be unsatisfactory in the past.
