Blanton, Margaret Gray. Bernadette of Lourdes. [New York:  Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50.]

The life of Bernadette Soubirous forms one of the more remarkable of those individual histories whose development have made for the growth of special symbolic values, increasing with time, and holding constant attraction for given patterns of instinctual reaction. The case of Bernadette is of special interest because it is comparatively close to us in time; possesses a specific documentation of ample proportion as well as a subsequent correlative literature of untold extent; and has given rise to a succession of phenomena in the sphere of reactive symbolic states in health and disease unique in medical history. To find an adequate analogue one would have to go back to some of the collective manifestations of earlier history in which forms of suggestion induced protracted epidemics of diverse reversible behavior modes—similarly associated and interrelated with specific types of religious and social setting. That which makes for a chief difference between Lourdes and earlier phenomena of collective hysteria as well as between Bernadette's history and that of other historical mystics is the extent to which astutely directed organization and propaganda have transformed the single development of hysteria in a young girl into an institution attracting for temporary remission and expected cure innumerable patients with almost every variety of involvement.

For the psychiatrist and medical historian special interest attaches to the history of the initial case and to the many ramifications developed after her death. Despite the mass of literature presently at hand concerning Lourdes, there is ample room for studies drawn from entirely objective standpoints, and even more so for those which incorporate as a main groundwork the conceptions of psychosomatic reversible processes which alone are able to provide a materialistic interpretation of the changes in individual cases observed there.

Mrs. Blanton's study of Bernadette and Lourdes is based on personal observation and investig