BODY BUILD IN SCHIZOPHRENIA, WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO AGE

Abstract

AIMS Any disease so frequent, so often difficult to diagnose and so grave as dementia praecox is worth attack even by the undramatic study of build. Psychiatrists record intently many physical and laboratory findings which are customary and indeed useful in medical practice but only too often are of no aid in the diagnosis of mental disease. On the other hand, they care little for studies of build and constitution, although these on the whole support the ancient belief that relations between body and mind can be detected and used. In studies of build crucial experiments or dramatic deviations from the normal are rare, leaving the alternative of comparisons between averages for moderate abnormalities. This alternative is not alluring, partly because it is tedious and partly because medical science has lagged behind other sciences in respect to the advances in applied mathematics. Medical statistics have often been labor lost—unreliable or