Professor Goldberg's (Reference Goldberg2001) excellent retrospective demonstrates the breadth of reading that used to be part of psychiatric training. His statement that General Psychopathology by Karl Jaspers is “out of print” is happily not the case. It was republished by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1997 in two volumes and is readily available via internet booksellers.

As Goldberg states, the work influenced a whole generation of psychiatrists and remains a very readable text, full of detail and close observation, which harks back to a time when meticulous detail and careful attention to language were essentials of good psychiatric practice. Any student of psychiatry, at any level, would do well to take a look.