[4] 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.
[citation needed] 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 a trainee in the university department in Newcastle-upon-Tyne before moving to the professorial unit of the Maudsley Hospital in London where he came under the influence of Sir Aubrey Lewis.
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.
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.