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Russell Barton was a leading figure in the unlocking of wards in mental hospitals, in rehabilitation, and the move to community care in the middle of the last century.

As a medical student, Russell courageously worked in the recently liberated, infamous K.Z. Lager at Belsen. He qualified at Westminster Hospital in 1947. After National Service in the Royal Navy, he became a Registrar and Clinical Tutor (medical and psychiatric) at his old hospital. He then moved to the Maudsley Hospital under the formidable Sir Aubrey Lewis.

As a Senior Hospital Medical Officer at Shenley Hospital he led and inspired us to encourage patients with chronic schizophrenia to occupy themselves in small groups. He succeeded in unlocking wards, so transforming a situation in which half the 2000 in-patients in the hospital had been treated in three blocks of locked wards.

In 1960, he was appointed Physician Superintendent of Severalls Hospital, Colchester. He collaborated with Mapperley and Netherne Hospitals in a study, the results of which were published by Professors J. K. Wing and G. W. Brown in 1970. During the 8 years of the study, one-third of the long-term patients with schizophrenia improved clinically. The industrial work introduced at Severalls accounted for much of the clinical improvement there.

In 1971, he was offered financial incentives to relinquish his post and remain as one of the four consultants at the hospital: a firm believer in proper clinical leadership, he declined and moved to Rochester (NY) where he became Director of the State Hospital and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York School of Psychiatry. He published A Short Practice of Clinical Psychiatry in 1975. In due course, he retired from Rochester Psychiatric Center but continued to undertake medico-legal work. It is interesting to quote a press cutting in 1989 which recorded him as saying in Court, ‘Translated literally, Mr Cleary, “distinguished colleague” means “bloody fool”’.

A certain extraverted flamboyance led some to underestimate him. Many of his aphorisms would put life into this account. On one occasion he said to me ‘Not having been at the Maudsley, you will not have heard of Occam's razor’. I quoted the fourteenth-century original, at which his scorn deepened; ‘At the Maudsley, it would have been regarded as a ridiculous affectation to quote it in Latin’.

Russell was a good friend and colleague and will be much missed.