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It is a pleasure to call attention to the appearance of a fifth edition of a work which has been so favorably known since its original publication in 1915 that extended comment upon this new edition, revised with a completeness such that hardly a chapter remains as it was in the previous edition, is scarcely necessary. At this date, indeed, it is almost superflous to remark that the point of view from which the book is written is that of the concept of the nervous system as the organizer of all experience, “racial as well as individual,” and the coordinator of that experience. Furthermore, to quote from the introductory chapter, it is “not only a work on diseases of the nervous system, but it would offer a general viewpoint from which to regard all types of disease, even though it makes its main object to discuss such modifications of function of certain organs as are comprised within the very broad confines of neuropsychiatry.”
The revision which the present edition represents is perhaps most complete and at the same time most eloquent of the spirit of the whole work in the 200-page section on the neurology of metabolism, consisting of two sumptuously illustrated chapters on the vegetative nervous system and the endocrinopathies, respectively. For it is here that the authors have in particular striven to portray “adequately and judiciously the front line advances of this knowledge”; so that if it should here and there prove that they have accepted too early and approved too fully the newer researches in this field, they have done so in the belief that in a realm of knowledge beset with hundreds upon hundreds of unsolved problems, as is true of neuropsychiatry to a degree undoubtedly greater than in any other field of medicine, “a healthy optimism is to be preferred to a studied conservatism”—hence “a certain preference for things hoped for, rather than a repetition of that which is already proven.” Equally is this forward-looking spirit in evidence in the section on