Lectures on Hysteria and Allied Vasomotor Conditions. By Thomas Dixon Savill, M.D., Physician to the West End Hospital for Diseases of the Nervous System, Welbeck Street, London. Cloth. Pp. 262, with 21 illustrations. Price, $2.50 net. New York: William Wood & Co., 1909.
Notwithstanding the fact that one of these books is in its fourth edition, we note the books together, because hysteria and neurasthenia are not so clearly differentiated in the mind of the average practitioner as they should be. And we fear that Savill's lectures will not help much toward making the differentiation any clearer; for, in building up the hypothetical pathology of both diseases, he lays so much stress on vasomotor manifestations and analogies, and attributes these so largely to an underlying toxemia that one is forced to ask wherein, after all, hysteria and neurasthenia differ. The only difference Savill seems to make is that hysteria is