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About 1930 the staff of Worcester State Hospital began a comprehensive study of schizophrenia. Psychiatrists, endocrinologists, physiologists, internists, statisticians and psychologists combined their research talents for the purpose of gaining a rounded picture of patients classified as schizophrenic. Some eighty patients were intensively studied over a period of seven months ('before directed treatment was begun'), with subsequent tests and observations throughout the succeeding ten years. The data from which this monograph was derived were 'integrated essentially as presented now' in 1941, but publication had to be deferred because of the war.
This book would more accurately have been called Prolegomena to a Study of the Psychological Aspects of Deterioration in Schizophrenia, being as much a preliminary survey of the field, and a critique of research methods, as it is a report of findings which, in any case, are most tentatively submitted with the fullest awareness of the magnitude of the task left undone. From the group of eighty patients, the psychological test findings of twenty-five were selected as offering data for the study of deterioration. These included the two top groups (out of five) from the point of view of coöperation in taking the battery of psychological tests. Ten tests were administered, falling into four groups: general intelligence, the Stanford-Binet and the Army Alpha; apperceptive, the Kent-Rosanoff and the Rorschach (in part); 'conative', accessibility to environmental stimulation and reaction to interruption of tasks; motor and learning, steadiness, tapping, prod learning and simple-auditory and discrimination-visual reaction time.
Deterioration is defined: functioning at a level below the subject's characteristic optimal performance due to an integral impairment of the organism rather than to such temporary or extrinsic factors as passing physical illness, fatigue, emotional disturbance, or poor external conditions for performan