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This book begins presumably to tell about a young physician who feels the need of training in psychiatry before embarking into surgical practice, but before two chapters are finished, the young man himself is almost forgotten and successive pictures of mental hospital life are unfolded and the young physician is only “among the present.”
The author writes a foreword in which he compares the theatre and the asylum. This is not a happy choice for the reader may feel more the emotions of the circus, not forgetting peanuts and sawdust, rather than the quiet accents of loge and foyer.
Especially good are the paragraphic descriptions of various psychoses. They are reduced to terms of the layman insofar as is consistent with accuracy and can be understood by any intelligent person. The pettiness of institution life and its effect on staff and employees has not been glossed over. One feels that it is a sober book and that the subject it deals with also is sombre. The chapter treating of dementia paralytica (general paresis) is well done but possibly more optimistic in its outlook to recovery than is warranted by recent statistics.
For the relative who must give painful consent to the commitment of a dear one to a institution for mental patients, this may be a good preparation toward making a wise choice. The author describes various categories of insanity mentioning a word about the cause and occasionally the prognosis and illustrates each with anecdotes.
Students of social work, families with members who are mentally ill and tax-payers who wonder where their tax dollars go should read this. It is accurate, comprehensive and even occasionally comic. A book such as this is always useful but we must question the author's attempt at times to over-dramatize.