The Pharmacological Shock Treatment of Schizophrenia: By Manfred Sakel. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 62. New York and Washington: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1938. 133 pp.

This rather belated note on Dr. Sakel's treatment of schizophrenia with insulin may have a certain value because since the appearance of the book a number of reports have begun to trickle through into medical literature suggesting that the original enthusiasm with

which Dr. Sakel's method was greeted had more of the emotion characteristic of traditional psychiatry than is scientifically justified. There is a foreword by Pötzl and an introduction by Nolan D. C. Lewis, a preface by Foster Kennedy, an introduction by the author and one hundred and thirty-two pages of text. The psychoanalyst will find this book very interesting as a manifestation of the age-long reaction formation against anxiety, a reaction which insists that everything is physical and everything else is mortal sin. Dr. Kennedy's usually brilliant style leads him into a state of enthusiasm not entirely scientific. His attack on Freud is rather uncalled for and his inalienable belief in the body, expressed in terms of pure faith, makes one wonder whether the words of Keats quoted by the prefator may not be justifiably applied to those whom Kennedy represents:

Fanatics have their dreams, wherein they weave A paradise for a sect.