Ten Years of Co-operative Effort

Abstract

The meeting of this section in Buffalo, New York, ten years ago, marked the beginning of a new era in the history of the criminal law and of psychiatry, an era of mutual understanding and sympathy. At that time a Committee, consisting of Professor Rollin M. Perkins (Chairman), Mr. Louis F. Cohane and Mr. Alfred Bettman, was appointed to work with a similar Committee of the American Psychiatric Association in studying the proposals of the latter Association regarding medico-legal problems, this committee to report the following year. It would be folly, of course, to claim that the appointment of such a Committee came as a bolt from the blue. Significant steps in progress result from the fermentation of ideas, and these ideas, in turn, originate in the minds of progressive individuals. The history then of this Committee and of the attitude of mind which its appointment signifies is one of ideas and of personalities.