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Esquirol, who first applied the statistical method to the study of mental disease, presented a 'memoire' to the Academy of Medicine in 1824 in which he asked, 'Are there now more mentally ill than there were forty years ago?' The question is often repeated today, but until now most of the replies have been given in the name of Echo.
This study, compiled by two social statisticians of the Rand Corporation, is a careful investigation of a century of rates of admission of patients to mental hospitals in Massachusetts, a state in which detailed data are available, thanks to such early workers as Pliny Earle, Samuel Woodward, Edward Jarvis, and in more recent times Dr. Neil Dayton. The authors have been able thus to compute age-specific rates for first admissions for the five-year periods 1840-1884 and for 1885, which they compare with those for the period 1917-1940. Briefly, they conclude that in the age groups thirty to fifty there has been no increase in the frequency of admissions among men and women between 1885 and the contemporary period (p. 57). Comparing the period, 1840-1844, they find the 1940 female first admission psychosis rates for the United States as a whole, for