"The Snake Pit"

is the rule. The care of patients in the wards in America is " largely in the hands of untrained and often ignorant attendants, the proportion of graduate nurses* to patients in 1946 being only 1 to 143, whereas it has apparently not occurred to the British that the nursing care of the mentally ill could conceivably be entrusted to anyone except a nurse Dr. Pratt, in this article, refers to the general impression of observers that English hospital patients are less disturbed, which is sometimes attributed to the phlegmatic British temperament. He suggests, however, that: " the less disturbed character of English refractory wards is owing rather to a combination