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This text-book, intended for medical students and written by a devoted student of Dr. Adolf Meyer, is dedicated to a presentation of Dr. Meyer's point of view and teaching; and appreciated as such in a preface written by Dr. Meyer for the first edition and now reprinted in the second. It is therefore of interest to the host of psychiatrists who came directly or indirectly under Dr. Meyer's influence as teacher, clinician and guide during the more than twenty-five years that he was Professor of Psychiatry in the Johns Hopkins Medical School—the period which was to see psychiatry emerge from the hospital background to become an active extramural therapy and a force in the community.
The book is carefully organized, conveniently arranged, and well printed. Its contents are divided into three main sections. The first part (120 pp.) deals with 'Psychobiology, the study of Normal Behaviour' which is presented through outlines of the personality study, generally autobiographical, which was required of all students of psychiatry at Hopkins. The outline, here, deals so much, however, with various tests, that one misses somewhat the sense of vision of a developing personality which is so enticingly promised (p. 29) in the stated aim 'to acquaint the student with the sense of importance of the meanings in activity, unfolding as personal biography, a purpose not unlike that of the historian and dramatist.' The second part (378 pp.), the bulk of the book, deals with 'Abnormal Behaviour, Pathology and Psychiatry', and the third part (94 pp.) is devoted to treatment, the last three pages constituting a short chapter on mental hygiene. It is especially surprising that this last section should be so brief, since one of Meyer's great contributions to American psychiatry was his sustained support of a point of view which crystallized in the mental hygiene movement.
In the treatment of distressed people Meyer had unusual gifts of enduring patience and an extraordinary capacity f