Stedman, Thomas Lathrop and Garber, Stanley Thomas. Stedman's Practical Medical Dictionary. Fourteenth Revised Edition. [Baltimore:  The Williams & Wilkins Company. $7.00.]

Dr. Stedman died, at the age of 84, while preparing this last edition of his valuable dictionary. It was brought to a finish through collaboration, begun some time past, with his nephew, Dr. Garber.

“Words are but tools. Wise men use them as counters, they are the

money of fools,” comes to us from one of the wise men of the past and Stedman for years spent his time in perfecting and fashioning these medical tools, these counters whereby one may have mental traffic with his neighbor.

Excellent as is this work of Dr. Stedman's, for the psychoanalyst and neuropsychiatrist, it is far from satisfactory. Psychoanalysis, as a study of unconscious mental processes and their significance, is not even glimpsed. We found nothing about the psychoanalytic Ego; the Super-Ego is not even listed, the definitions of the mental mechanisms, transference, distortion, etc., are faulty or absent. It is to be regretted that Jones’ glossary had no part in the preparation of the work and that present-day psychiatry and psychopathology is so inadequately presented. The ancient legal word “insanity” is still retained and given a medical significance which is a definite boner, or rather a fault that tends to keep alive a series of outworn conceptions—hindrances to the development of precise psychopathological terminology. Whereas developments in knowledge concerning leucocytes, for example, are well presented, no such touch with present day psychiatric conceptions is apparent. It is desirable to have a dictionary that retains medieval and outmoded terms and conceptions, but that many such thought fossils should be given present-day validity is to be deprecated and condemned. Fortunately such are few but to the neuropsychiatrists they stand out like sore thumbs in the etymological landscape. We imagine our psychological conferes will find similar lapses. Gestalt psychology, for instance, is not mentioned and Kaffka, Goldstein, Kohler, Wertheimer, etc., are not listed. No, Stedman is not up to d