"THE RANGE OF THE GENERAL PRACTITIONER IN PSYCHIATRIC DIAGNOSIS"

To the Editor:  —I have just been reading the little gem by Dr. O. I. Hess (The Journal, Nov. 15, 1919, p. 1544), and thought that possibly I could inform him regarding the meaning of "somatopsychic." The term is such a common one and has so long been firmly embedded in psychiatric language that I had supposed every medical student would have heard it at least once. Certainly, no man can read a psychiatric textbook published in this country in the last fifteen or twenty years and not find the term.It was originally proposed by Wernicke, whose contributions did so much to clear up the confusion that existed in certain fields in psychiatry. Wernicke divided delusions into three types: allopsychic, autopsychic and somatopsychic. White's "Outline of Psychiatry" or any other standard book will give a good discussion of these terms. In fact, the terms themselves are so simply compounded