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Dr. May's book strikes a distinctly new note among the works devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. May takes up the subject from the standpoint of Public Health. He is not preparing a textbook, but is undertaking a survey of the mental disease problem with the hope of stimulating a more comprehensive, systematic and adequate investigation of this important field in the future. In undertaking this method of approach necessarily there has to be a considerable resort to statistics. We have, as the author indicates, no really reliable information as to the incidence of mental diseases in the community, certainly nothing at all comparable to the information of the incidence of contagious diseases. The only available way of approach to gaining an idea of what this incidence may be is from the statistics of the various institutions throughout the country that care for the mentally ill, and while the author disclaims any tendency to overestimate the value of statistics, still he feels the necessity, so far as possible, of sticking close to the facts rather than wandering off into the region of abstract theories or individual observations.
As might be expected from this way of dealing with the subject, the first chapters contain a very considerable mass of statistical information