Historical chapters in scientific books are generally dull even though they do not intend to be. There is an understandable need to record what happened in the past even though it may be quite irrelevant to what is going on today. We are frequently asked to remember George Santayana’s comment, made by many others, that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ (Santayana, 1905). But this is hardly relevant for a textbook on The Wheel. Those who concentrate on wheel technology are not going to be particularly interested, except in a voyeuristic sense, in how Neolithic people might have been able to move large blocks of stone to Stonehenge for hundreds of miles using primitive garden rollers. But with personality disorder it is different. Without some knowledge of the history of personality disorder current descriptions cannot be placed in any sort of context.