Clive Farran-Ridge had a remarkable life, living on a plane of activity denied to most men. He teemed with ideas but never reached the highest level of his capabilities.

In the First World War he was a captain in the RAMC, and upon his discharge pursued his psychiatric training at several of England's best hospitals before taking his DPM. Whilst at Stafford he and Drury (for a long time secretary of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association) produced a paper on insulin treatment but missed its full action as coma therapy, later to be introduced by Sakel. Upon his return to Australia he followed Ellery as the departmental pathologist and gave the Beattie-Smith lectures in 1932. In 1940 he returned to clinical practice and was the medical superintendent of Beechworth in 1940, Ararat in 1942 and Ballarat in 1946 where he stayed until his retirement in 1951.

It was a time of great psychiatric activity, since the new physical treatments were practised on a large scale. Farran-Ridge started insulin coma therapy at Mont Park, and made extensive enquiries into `asylum dysentery’ which claimed many lives in the 1930s. He examined the blood bromide of manic-depressives following upon Zondek's work, and he also investigated female sex-hormone excretion. He followed the changes in the cerebrospinal fluid of patients undergoing malarial treatment for general paralysis, examined the blood sugars, the cholesterol and the urinary excretion of epileptics and treated a series of patients with sulfosin. He also did the post-mortem examinations at these hospitals, all this with only two technicians to help him.

Additionally he was a horticulturalist of some note, and he planted an enormous number of trees in the various hospital grounds. In his spare time he amassed a large library and made hundreds of lantern slides for teaching purposes. As Cade said in a delightful article in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1973, Farran-Ridge had too many irons in the fire so his restless imagination defeated his persistence.