Modern Attitudes in Psychiatry; The March of Medicine, 1945: Number X of the New York Academy of Medicine Lectures to the Laity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. 195 pp.

These lectures, the tenth in an annual series of lectures to the laity given by the New York Academy of Medicine, summarize past trends and the accelerating tempo of modern changes in the field of psychiatry. The first chapter, by Iago Galdston, traces the history of psychiatry from Hippocrates and Asclepiades to the latter part of the nineteenth century. James Wall continues the historical review through the nineteenth century with emphasis on the work of Sigmund Freud, and, in America, Adolph Meyer. G. Canby Robinson, in the third chapter, gives instances, from the outpatient department of Johns Hopkins Hospital, of patients' emotional problems, particularly their reactions to social conditions, as applied in medical treatment.

The trend to reunite medicine and the care of the mentally ill is emphasized in a chapter by Franz Alexander, who notes a trend in modern medicine to include the total personality of the patient. The psychosomatic viewpoint is applied to schizophrenic and it is suggested that altered biochemistry of the schizophrenic patient may be produced by emotional factors, and these biochemical factors may then, in turn, influence the mental state. Other problems of psychosomatic medicine that have yet to be explored, are mentioned. Shock treatment has not yet been sufficiently correlated with psychoanalytic studies of the patients. Cultural psychology, education and the sociologically prophylactic viewpoint are stressed as cogent problems.

William Menninger describes how 'the greatest mass psychopathological reaction in history', the recent war, was dealt with