Frank James Fish was born on 26 May 1917 and died suddenly on 13 June 1968 at the age of 51 years. He was the first professor of psychiatry at the University of Liverpool, and prior to that a senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh. His publications helped bring the German tradition of descriptive psychopathology to the attention of English-speaking psychiatrists.
Early Life
He passed the London General School Examination in 1933 and in 1935 obtained the science qualification necessary for him to enrol at the London Hospital Medical College that October. He qualified with the Conjoint diploma in 1939. After resident posts in medicine and surgery he joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and served during the Second World War in North Africa, where he was taken prisoner at the fall of Tobruk. In 1943 he managed to escape from captivity in Italy and after what his BMJ obituarist calls "a period of considerable hardship and excitement" he reached the allied lines. He was demobilised in 1946 with the rank of captain.
Fish moved to the University of Edinburgh as a senior lecturer in psychological medicine in 1956, and became a member of the Royal College of Physicians there in 1964. That year he became the first professor of psychiatry at the University of Liverpool. He set up professorial units of psychiatry at Rainhill Hospital and Walton Hospital, Liverpool. Apart from undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research, and writing several textbooks, his main contribution has been to bring German descriptive psychopathology to the attention of English-speaking psychiatrists, in particular the works of Carl Wernicke, Karl Kleist and Karl Leonhard, which stand apart from the Anglo-American tradition dominated earlier by psychoanalysis and now by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. This serves to balance the earlier uncritical acceptance of psychoanalytic theory. His Clinical Psychopathology: Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry became a classic for postgraduate students. Despite championing Wernicke, Kleist and Leonhard, Fish wrote that Emil Kraepelin was "probably the most outstanding psychiatrist who ever lived." However, he said the general orientation of his "Outline of Psychiatry" was "neo-Meyerian:" i.e., "that in any given case, all the factors which may possibly be relevant should be considered and the appropriate measures, based on empirical knowledge, psychoanalytic theory, sociology, or common sense, should be applied."
