Getting things wrong

Images of people getting things wrong pervade this week's issue. Andrew Whitehouse sets the tone in his letter (p 53), in which he likens a previous correspondent's disparagement of appraisals for consultants to the attitude of 19th century surgeons, “who were said to sharpen their scalpels on their boots to show their contempt for the microbe theory.”

Undoing such misconceptions often takes painstaking work, as the study by Noam Trieman and colleagues shows (p 13). In many countries community care for long term psychiatric patients “has been demonised …