The Mastery of Nervousness, Based Upon Self-ReËducation. By Robert S. Carroll, M.D., Medical Director, Highland Hospital, Asheville, North Carolina. Price $2.00 Net. New York:  The Macmillan Co., 1917. ( 9),  346 Pages.

It is difficult for a medical man to evaluate a book of this kind, for the effect which it will have upon the audience for which it is obviously intended—the lay public—is a matter of guess-work. As an exponent of the uplift—mens sana in cor pore sano, work and play, be good and let who will be clever, don't worry, overeat, or drug yourself, Dr. Carroll seems to fulfill all the requirements. But such a facile philosophy is always open to the objection that, while it apparently covers the vast subject of neurosis, it fails to apply to individual neurotics. Slothful-ness, overeating, drug-addiction, introspection, worry, and all the other alleged causes of nervousness we know are themselves but symptoms of the neurotic character. Which is, according to Adler, a straining towards a fictitious goal on account of a sense of inferiority which tends to psychic over-compensation through the central nervous system. Or, with Freud, we can say that the neuroses have a sexual etiology, of a physical nature in neurasthenia, of an infantile nature in the psycho-neuroses.

Dr. Carroll's solution of the problem of existence for the neurotics is to attain harmony with life, “ultimate control by the moral idea,”