The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance: By Gregory Zilboorg. (Oxford University Press, London, 1935. Pp. 215. Price 4 s. 6 d.

In three lectures Dr. Zilboorg describes the beginning of psycho-pathological study during the witchcraft epidemic of the Middle Ages. He defines the Church's orientation to psychic illness by extracts from the Malleus Maleficarum, sketches certain current speculative views and gives an account of the life and works of Johann Weyer who made the first realistic inquiry into mental disorder.

The interest of this historical survey lies in the recognition that the inquisitors in their examination of witches made as accurate observations of mental illness as any that were recorded until the intensive studies of conscious and unconscious material in this century, but that their understanding of psycho-physical phenomena was strictly determined by their conception of a diabolical internal object. Weyer's realism extended beyond clinical observation and informed his interpretation of symptoms and his therapeutic methods. Reference to his book, De proestigiis doemonum, proves that Weyer was in fantasy more concerned with a poisonous internal fluid than with an anthropomorphic internal object, but it is not altogether clear what functions he ascribed to the devil in causing men either to sin or to fall ill.