Notes

The SALMON COMMITTEE ON PSYCHIATRY AND MENTAL HYGIENE named Brigadier General J. R. Rees, Consultant Psychiatrist to the British Army, to deliver the Salmon Lectures for 1944 at the New York Academy of Medicine on November 20, 21, and 22, 1944. As Captain in the R.A.M.C. in the first world war, he saw service in Belgium, France, Mesopotamia, and North Persia. He was formerly Neurological Specialist, Ministry of Pensions, and Medical Superintendent, Bowden House. He now holds the post of Medical Director, The Tavistock Clinic (The Institute of Medical Psychology).

The subject of Brigadier General Rees's first lecture was The Frontiers Extend, in which he reviewed the experiences of the war insofar as they open up new psychiatric responsibilities. He traced the developments of the new social psychiatry and of new practices in selection and placement engendered by the realism of the war period. He presented material to show that wartime priorities are prophylaxis in the building up of mental health. The subject of the second lecture was Opportunities Emerge. Asserting that training methods, morale, and disciplinary problems have been matters of urgency in the army, as indeed they have also been in civilian life, Brigadier General Rees discussed the fact that men and women of all kinds and qualities challenge our psychiatric skill and that war psychiatry has contributed to the women's services, to adult education, and to resocialization of the sick and maimed, as well as in matters of intelligence and aptitude testing and the selection of officer candidates and other special groups on the basis of studies in character, personality, leadership and stability. In the third lecture, The Way Ahead, he surveyed both the old and new responsibilities of psychiatry in which he indicated that individual breakdown is perhaps less important than group breakdown. He pointed out that a wider and better education for the psychiatrist is needed if he is to be equipped for the f