The Practitioners' Library of Medicine and Surgery

a language of its own. On the whole, it can be said that the editor has succeeded remarkably well. Further, psychiatry must still be classed as a medical art which is trying hard, with only limited success up to the present, to become a medical science. The .following paragraph, quoted from this book, shows the difficulties of writing on this subjectThe main offices of the author will be eclectic, that is to select from the whole mass of principles, theories and facts those which seem relevant to the problems of the general practitioner as he deals with the human being m all his relationships and especially in sickness, and to weld the selected material into a coherent and noncontradictory approach. This selection and welding will be, to a certain extent, arbitrary and express a personal point of view. This cannot be helped in a field in which objective scientific method is more a consummation to be devoutly wished for than at present realized'. In a section headed ' social hypochondriasis' it is suggested that many acquired neuroses are engendered in the child by its mother and in the adult by his physician through injudicious insistence in an unwelcome diet, and the writer suggests that the state of anxiety provided by insistence on a rigid diet in the hypertensive subject is likely to do him more harm than any mild dietary indiscretion. The subjects have been arranged on an etiological basis as far as possible, and a hard-and-fast line has not been drawn between neuroses and psychoses; for example, the a;tiology, pathology and clinical manifestations of neurosyphilis, from symptomless neurosyphilis to general paralysis of the insane, are discussed side by side. Incidentally, the unqualified statement that five per cent of syphilitics develop general paralysis is surely misleading; on the basis of ten per cent of the population having a syphilitic taint (a low figure), the general paralysis incidence should be five per thousand. Considerable space is given to drug psychoses, and here opium receives most attention. The methods of treatment are well discussed but we did not notice any reference to the vesicatory blister or the lecithin methods. We agree with the statement in this chapter, that ' Mohammedans would not be classified as a peaceloving race'; we should not classify them as a race at all, any more than we should refer to the Christian