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The book is an effort on the part of the author who has devoted thirty years as the head of a private sanatorium in the treatment of functional diseases to elucidate on the methods which in his hands have produced many cures.
Sufferers from all forms of functional diseases are treated in the book under one common term, “Variants.” A variant is being defined as “A sufferer from functional mental disease who in one way or another varies more or less from the hypothetical or arbitrary average.”
“The variant who is a potential neurasthenic psychasthenic or the subject of any other functional malady is born handicapped, he inherits family traits of ability or mediocrity, of vice and virtue, of health, disease and crime as well as various physical desirable and undesirable characteristics. Such individuals who are unfit are often so because they demand of themselves that they conform with the majority whereas they should be taught that all they need is to conform only with themselves.” An all embracing term as variant applied to the great variety of functional disorders would of course preclude any scientific exposition of the subject and in vain will the reader look for any critical analysis or proof of the author's deductions or methods of treatment.
We are told that attention to the gastric disturbances, which the author invariably finds in all of his cases of neurotic or psychic disturbance, and direction that the patients do so and so produce cures of obsessions, depressions or paranoid states. Thus a case of Kleptomania in a refined lady is cured by telling the patient that each time the desire came into her consciousness to secrete in her trunk a book which did not belong to her she was to sit down at her desk and write out exactly what was passing in her thoughts.
At her next impulse to steal she did as the doctor directed and when her impulse expressed itself in written words: “I am about to secrete a book which does not belong to me-to steal it-” the act, the author