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This book brings up to date the 1932 survey of psychiatric teaching, made under the auspices of the Division of Psychiatric Education of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene of which the coauthor, Franklin G. Ebaugh, was an Associate Director. The 1932 survey has been followed up by questionnaires in 1934, 1937 and 1940. Additional data were obtained from many other sources,
and particularly from the reports on the conference on psychiatric education held in 1933, 1934, 1935, and 1936. In addition to presenting the curricula of preclinical, clinical, graduate and postgraduate psychiatric teaching in medical schools and of psychiatric training in hospitals, it quotes copiously the opinions of a large number of teachers of psychiatry on many relevant phases of medical and psychiatric education. What we have here, then, is an authoritative work which presents the large accomplishments, problems, and the prospects of psychiatric education in America. It is such a clear report on prevailing psychiatric thought in America in the last three decades, that it can be profitably read as a history of this phase of psychiatry.
The authors, both leaders in psychiatric teaching, are not content with the rôle of reporters, and the book obtains much of its readability from the fervor with which they set forth their definition of psychiatry, and their plea for its rightful place in medical education. It is their thesis that psychobiology, 'the American School of Psychiatry', encompasses the most mature thought in psychiatry. The ultimate program they propose is that medicine should be taught as psychobiology. Thus, the first year medical curriculum would be psychobiology taught from the viewpoint of the anatomist, the chemist, the psychobiologist, and the psychiatrist. This would also apply in the teaching of the pathological and clinical sciences. 'Man as an individual' would be studied 'in relation to these various aspects of life'. Psychiatry is conceived as havin