Before the Second World War, when psychiatry was held in low esteem, much of the work was done in asylums which were reluctantly moving away from a custodial role. Only a limited array of treatments were available and, in the absence of anything else, charismatic individuals could assert themselves to an extent not possible elsewhere in medicine. Psychiatrists’ lives do not lend themselves to biography. Freud (who was not a psychiatrist), yes; Kraepelin’s mind-numbingly dull personal life, no; after that the list falls away almost vertically. The Australian scene is even bleaker. John Cade, the first to use lithium, was…