Practical Leads to Puzzling Diagnoses: Neuroses That Run Through Families

The author briefly summarizes his purposes and objectives as follows: "In this book I describe the symptoms and the syndromes which I found bothering 574 relatives of the psychotic and the alcoholic and 99 relatives of the epileptic. A number of these troubles appeared in such high percentages of the cases that they represent minor equivalents of psychosis and epilepsy. Certain it is that in the families with a poor nervous inheritance I have kept finding a remarkable amount of chronic and often life-long nervous illness, with constitutional inadequacy, neurocirculatory asthenia, hypochondriasis, unemployability, alcoholism and the habit of illness. I am left with the strong impression that these tendencies to illness are inherited." Even though the author professes his conclusions to be only impressions, his fervor makes him write as though it is an established fact that descendants of families with mental illness and alcoholism pass defective genes for the