THE status of the mentally ill has had a long journey from the demonology of the Middle Ages. Beginning with the Renaissance through the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, a quasi-criminal model was employed by secular courts in the isolation of the mentally ill from society. In time mental illness appears substantially at last to have achieved a medical status.The increasing number of psychiatric wards in general hospitals, the unlocking of doors in public mental hospitals and, perhaps most dramatically, the increasing numbers of voluntary patients in state hospitals are hard evidence of the changing status of . . .