It is an honour for me to be asked to contribute a foreword to the book of my friends Therese and Ralph Spitzer. I got to know them during an assignment as Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and I have shared to the full the distress that comes to all those who have to watch people that they love affected by mental illness in one form or another. I have been an orientalist for only half my life; for the first half I was a biochemist, embryologist, and experimental morphologist. "When I, a young man, was called to the bar" (as Gilbert & Sullivan have it), in...

It is an honour for me to be asked to contribute a foreword to the book of my friends Therese and Ralph Spitzer. I got to know them during an assignment as Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia at Vancouver, and I have shared to the full the distress that comes to all those who have to watch people that they love affected by mental illness in one form or another. I have been an orientalist for only half my life; for the first half I was a biochemist, embryologist, and experimental morphologist. "When I, a young man, was called to the bar" (as Gilbert & Sullivan have it), in...