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This monograph reports a study carried out upon paretics in the Manhattan State Hospital. The author sets out to devise a measure of mental deterioration, but in the very first paragraph of her report she abandons that purpose by defining deterioration as “impairment of mental functioning with no implications as to possible causes, whether physiogenic or psychogenic, and whether the condition is permanent or temporary.” What she measures then is function, mental efficiency, and she devises a numerical expression of this which she calls the “index to efficiency.” This is a measure for which psychology has long been waiting. Ever since the days of Binet we have known how to distinguish between intellectual level, the amount of intelligence actually possessed by an individual, and how that intelligence functions. A poor intelligence may function normally, and a fine one very poorly or abnormally. The latter is what happens in the psychoses, and if we can find a measure for the degree of malfunction in the psychosis we will have a tool which can easily be sharpened for use in industry and education as well.
Dr. Babcock proceeds by attempting to discover the “intellectual level” of her subjects before their psychoses developed, testing their present “mental efficiency” and then using the discrepancy between the two results as a measure of “mental deterioration.” Though her meaning is fairly obvious from the context, her use of terms is confusing, as she uses now one, now the other, to express the same idea. She discovers