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In the earliest part of the twentieth century, the scant attention paid to child mental health reflected a medical interest in ‘mental derangement’ and ‘mental deficiency’ with a few clinical descriptions of mania, melancholia, psychosis, autism and hyperactivity appearing in the medical literature, often with a presumed aetiology of organicity and heredity. A strong moral approach to child misbehaviour, prevalent in the nineteenth century, was still in evidence. In his Goulstonian lecture in 1902, 1 George Still (1868–1941), an eminent paediatrician, set out his observations of the onset of ‘an abnormal defect of moral control in children’ which appeared to have little to do with the environment and was not invariably associated with learning disabilities, although it could be associated with physical disease, especially of the brain. He is widely credited with the first description of Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity (ADHD).