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By Louis Mars, M.D. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1946. 103 pp.
LA LUTTE CONTRE LA FOLIE (The Fight Against Insanity). By Louis Mars, M.D. Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Imprimerie de l'Etat, 1947. 133 pp.
These two books were written by Dr. Louis Mars, who enjoys a two-fold distinction. In his own right, he is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Port-au-Prince and a member of the Ethnology Institute of Haiti. Before settling down to practice on this island, he did extensive graduate work in France and in the United States. He also is the son of a very distinguished father, Dr. Price Mars, also a physician, senator, ambassador, and Haitian delegate to the United Nations. Both father and son have contributed greatly to better social, ethnological, and medical knowledge in the Haitian Republic.
Many ethnological, philosophic, and medical treatises have been published on voodoo. Dr. Mars's book seems to be the first attempt to study these phenomena from a psychiatric point of view. He describes psychiatric observations of people possessed by voodoo as