Respectful towards empirical evidence, rather than a lover of grand theories, Linford Rees, who has died aged 89, was a highly influential figure among the postwar generation that helped establish British psychiatry as a science-based discipline. He made extraordinary contributions to clinical psychiatry, professional training, research, and the profession's status and organisation.
Rees was born into a Welsh-speaking home in Buryport, south Wales, the eldest son of a teacher - and there were other teachers in the family. From Llanelli grammar school he went on to the Cardiff Welsh National School of Medicine, qualifying in 1938 and choosing psychiatry as his career.
Given the state of the profession at the time, this was perhaps a rather surprising choice. He trained at London's Maudsley Hospital, and gained his diploma in psychological medicine in 1940.
During the second world war he treated servicemen who had become psychiatric casualties.
After a period pioneering NHS psychiatric services in Wales as a regional psychiatrist, he was recruited to the Maudsley, where he remained from 1954 to 1966 - during the heady days when Aubrey Lewis was in the lead and a galaxy of talent provided the peer group. He left the Maudsley to take the foundation chair in psychiatry at St Bartholomew's Hospital.
After retirement from that position in 1980, he established an immensely successful private practice and developed the Charter Clinic's psychiatric services.
A scanning of Rees's publication list speaks to great accomplishment. But more deeply, it provides insights into the evolutions in psychiatry that were to take place during one man's long career. His first scientific report (published with Carl Lambert in 1944), was on Intravenous Barbiturates In The Treatment Of Hysteria. Other early work dealt with treatments that have long since been discredited - electronarcosis, insulin therapy and high dosage cortisone in the treatment of schizophrenia. But then came the beginnings of the new dawn with the arrival of chlorpromazine (Largactil) as an effective treatment for schizophrenia, and imipramine (Tofranil) and other drugs for the treatment of depression.
Rees's publications reveal him at the forefront of the trials which helped establish the value of the new pharmacotherapies. His first paper on chlorpromazine was published in 1955. His knowledge of the pharmaceutical aspect of therapeutics became prodigious and he was a world authority on what drugs can do to help the mentally ill. But Rees never believed that drug treatment could ever, by itself, hold the whole answer for anything so complex in its origins as mental illness. He had a particular interest in, and contributed to, psychosomatic research, with papers on asthma, hayfever, urticarica and migraine.
Rees was treasurer of the World Psychiatric Association (1966-78), president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists (1975-78), and, unusually for a psychiatrist, president of the British Medical Association (1978-79). He sat on or chaired numerous government committees, was on the General Medical Council, contributed to the work of the World Health Organisation and was a governor of University College, Cardiff. He held honorary memberships of professional societies in America, Germany, Greece, Spain, Sweden and Venezuela. In 1978 he was awarded the CBE.
Rees possessed charm, courtesy and humour. He was endlessly kind to younger professionals who asked him for advice. I first met him in 1959, when I had just arrived as a registrar at the Maudsley. Another senior figure in the psychiatric firmament to whom I showed the draft of a research paper with which I was struggling told me that it was unpublishable. But not Linford: he saw some worth in a fumbling piece of work, and helped me towards my first publication. Stories of such generosity abound. Every meeting I had with Linford over the following years had the qualities of a celebratory reunion.
Rees owned a speedboat and enjoyed water-skiing, sea fishing - and ballroom dancing. In old age, and with his sight failing, he still had a reader three times a week to keep him updated with the content of the scientific journals.
He married Catherine Thomas in 1940 and they enjoyed a happy marriage until her death in 1993. In his widowhood, Linford was wonderfully supported by his two sons and two daughters, who with nine grandchildren and two great-grandchildren survive him.
· William Linford Llewelyn Rees, psychiatrist, born October 24 1914; died July 29 2004
