Lectures in Psychiatry. (The Major Psychoses).

The twelve lectures presented in this volume are apparently a verbatim report of a course of lectures given to a class of undergraduate students. In his introduction, Dr. White stresses the arrangement of the lectures, which he has found from long experience affords a steplike progression from the more simple to the more complex types of mental disease. Beginning with situational reactions, the mechanisms of the development of which are readily understood, he passes to paresis and mental deficiency as examples of structural defect and then to epilepsy, the manic-depressive psychoses, including involutional melancholia, paranoia and finally dementia praecox. The lectures are illustrated with reports of cases, which are used as the basis for the comments on mechanisms and their meaning. The purpose has been to give the student some insight into the nature of the material with which the psychiatrist works and expressly not with the idea that the