Dr. George Rosen, Professor of Public Health Education at Columbia University, has published in this volume papers that originally were issued in periodicals not readily available to the analyst or psychiatrist. Two chapters, dealing with ancient Israel and with Greece and Rome in antiquity, are contributions published for the first time. The book, as the author clearly states, is concerned with the historical sociology of mental illness and not with any systematic presentation of the history of psychiatry. It describes the mutually shared attitudes toward mental illness during various historical epochs and the provisions for the treatment (or mistreatment) of the mentally ill by the community 'taking into account the political, social, and administrative patterns and factors that have had some relation to mental illness in different periods of history'. Dr.