Notes

WAR DEPARTMENT TECHNICAL BULLETIN, MEDICAL, 203 is revised Nomenclature and Method of Recording Diagnoses, dated 19 October 1945, and recently released.

The section which defines and classifies Psychiatric Disorders and Reactions merits the most careful attention of psychiatrists because, apart from its incidental adaptations to military usage, it is the best psychiatric nosology that has been so far devised.

Under the direction of Brigadier General William C. Menninger, leading military and civilian psychiatrists were consulted, and after extensive study during 1944 and 1945 the revised nomenclature was adopted.

It is especially noteworthy that this descriptive classification does not begin with the traditional 'organic' diagnoses which has betrayed the bias and orientation of all previous classifications.

That many of the terms and concepts used will arouse criticism and objection is unavoidable.

The etymologically absurd 'hysteria' has by accretion become endowed with protean false popular and scientific significances until—except in psychoanalysis where it is a clearly defined entity—it has become a term of opprobrium. That the widely differing symptoms of hysteria are sundry symptomatic expressions of one type of infantile neurosis does not detract from the nosological and educational value at the present time of differentiating Dissociative reaction, Phobic reaction, Conversion reaction (synonymous with conversion hysteria) and Somatization reactions ('used in preference to "psychsomatic reactions", since the latter term refers to a point of view on the discipline of medicine as a whole rather than to certain specified conditions')—although separating the last two seems rather arbitrary and unnecessary.

If one knows that military psychiatric nomenclature in this country included such quaint and unqualified 'diagnoses' as Dementia pugilistica and Masturbation until a little more than a year ago, what a tremendous advance TB MED 203 has made may be judged from a comp