Outline of Psychiatric Case-Study: A Practical Handbook: By Paul W. Preu. New York: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc., 1939. 133 pp.

Psychiatry began to feel that it has become a medical specialty when, first, it developed a classification of mental diseases and when, second, it adopted a method of study of the individual patient along the same lines as those used in other branches of medicine. To history taking, physical examination and laboratory data it added a particular examination of its own, the mental status. The history became a special subject of attention for psychiatry as it was hoped that complete and carefully taken case histories would be able to solve some of the baffling problems of psychiatry. Since the beginning of the century we have had an accumulation of thousands of case histories taken in our best mental hospitals, and I do not know of a single competent psychoanalyst of the present generation who has not contributed his share of such histories. But in spite of the adoption of a rigid classification system it became a fiasco within a decade. Somewhat later when the value of the case histories was tested by means of statistical analysis the results were extremely disappointing. One need only mention the statistical analysis of the records of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and the more thorough analysis of