I must confess that on opening this handsome volume, I gave in to the temptation of looking up my name in the index; there were two mentions, both quite favourable. Institutional histories, though, have to avoid the tendencies to be uncritical and to become bogged down in parochial detail. Bewley (an ex-President) has been successful in avoiding both these temptations, first, by frequent references to the online archive and second, by placing the story of the College firmly in a setting of the evolution of psychiatry itself.

There is now a substantial historical literature on that subject, but much of it – particularly by non-medical writers – is undermined by a failure of clinical understanding. No such problem here. This story also makes clear that the Medico-Psychological Association (MPA), which eventually became the College, was for decades pathetically small in membership. To refer to psychiatry in the mid-19th century as an influential profession, therefore, is entirely ahistorical. One factor which helped it to survive was the journal, first published in 1853 (its 150th anniversary in 2003 seems to have been overlooked). Bewley dislikes the present title of British Journal of Psychiatry, though that expresses most clearly what it is about. Similar journals had, in fact, appeared rather earlier in both Germany and the USA.

The gradual evolution of the MPA into the present College is the central part of this history. A key event was the granting of a Royal Charter in 1926, though as the aim got nearer, the rate of change slowed to a snail's pace. The author is particularly to be congratulated for acknowledging here, for the first time, the essential part played by Dr John Howells in obtaining college status. Initially, both the officers and Council of the RMPA were hostile or indifferent to the idea.

Trainees were equally apprehensive then about their own position, and it emerges clearly that training and education have since become the College's biggest achievements. In the qualification of nurses also, the MPA was, for a long while, the only body to take this task seriously. I would have liked to see a longer mention of the Maudsley Bequest lectures: for doctors in provincial hospitals, these were a lifeline of information, at a time when medical schools were of very little help. By now, psychiatrists have reason to be proud of their College, and this history will give them the essentials of how it came about.