The author's purpose is 'to ease the lot of the student of medicine … in the difficult field of mental disease'. As usual when this objective is pursued in psychiatric text-books, it tempts the author into oversimplification and at times inaccuracy. As has been the vogue in American text-books on psychiatry for the past two decades, the author makes free use of psycho-analytic terminology and includes a chapter on psycho-analysis which reveals many misconceptions (Free Association, p. 359), factual errors (p. 344) and lack of acquaintance with reliable sources of psycho-analytic authority (p. 351). While the misrepresentation of psycho-analysis in books of this type is regrettable, still the attention given to the subject indicates the extent to which psycho-analytic thought has permeated American psychiatry, to the benefit of management and understanding of cases, especially the schizophrenics, on whom no analysis is attempted.