Psychological Medicine. A Manual on Mental Diseases for Practitioners and Students.

Abstract

This is a systematic work on psychiatry, beginning with a chapter (18 pages) on normal psychology, embracing a consideration of the different forms of mental disease and ending with a chapter on treatment (39 pages). There is also a chapter of considerable size on general symptomatology, others on feigned insanity, relation of insanity with law, sleeplessness, etc. The author is a thoughtful, competent alienist of wide experience, but he has not found the secret of lucid, consecutive writing. No doubt he himself has a clear appreciation of the fundamental lines, the dominating traits of mental maladies, but he fails to bring them into salient relief. He lacks the power of graphic description. The book and the chapters are systematically divided, the paragraphs are not. For instance, under physical symptoms of alcoholism (page 191), is given a hodge-podge of symptoms; each one correct, but all enumerated in a hit-and-miss way which