Insanity

Insanity is purely a legal and a sociological term in the estimation of trained psychiatrists, although the general practitioner uses it, as do most people. His training has not been sufficiently specialized for him to cope intelligently with the mental abnormalities of the chance patient. The medical schools have been poorly organized in this respect, although the postgraduate student has been able to piece together a body of knowledge on the subject.

University Chair. Harvard last week remedied this curriculum hiatus by establishing a new chair of "dynamic and abnormal psychology." Dr. Morton Prince* will fill the chair next fall, he of the sleepy-seeming eyes and the insinuating voice. At 72 he is withdrawing from his Boston practice, but not from the editorship of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. In academic life he is certain to have large classes, for his plans are to teach not alone the causes and the complex descriptions of psychopathic conditions, but also the cures* so far as present knowledge and his ingenuity can suggest such. He will bring living cases for study, explain the facets of their idiosyncracies.

Music. All psychiatrists who attended the 82nd convention of the American Psychiatric Association in Manhattan last week knew that music which "soothes the savage beast," is also a sedative to the insane. Perhaps it is memory echoing up through a file of sea-rocked protoplasm. Certainly music, as well as rhythmic, beating surf, is calming.

The psychiatrists were more interested in the fact, reported by Dr. Arthur H. Harrington, that music is being applied as a definite therapeutic procedure in the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases. He is its superintendent.

Intelligence Tests. The psychiatrists laughed at intelligence tests as measuring-sticks of mentality: ". . . a diagnostic junkpile upon which are dumped a great number of individuals whose intelligence ratings have been arbitrarily determined."

St. Vitus Dance. At Albany, Dr. H. L. K. Shaw of the State Department of Health talked over the radio last week about St. Vitus Dance, the mildest, most hopeful form of chorea. Children, especially girls, are susceptible to this disease, which is usually the expression of mental exhaustion, although it may be an end result of maldevelopment or of various contagious diseases--tonsillitis, measles, whooping cough. Cure is usually effected by quiet surroundings, rest in bed, full diet with plenty of fatty ingredients (milk, eggs), and above all the eliminating of the causative conditions. Relapses occur--the signs of trembling, twitching, dancing, muscular incoordination often reappear at the end of an exhausting school semester.

Fright. In Berne, Switzerland, on a recent school holiday two Swiss boys, hand in hand, strolled through the town's arcaded streets. On the Nydeck Bridge they loitered to watch the waters of the Aar tumbling below the bluff on which Berne is built. Then they sauntered on to look at the antics of the live bears in the municipal pits which Berne has maintained since 1513. Amusing creatures, the bears . . . One of the boys leaned over the parapet--too far--tumbled into the pit. The bears found him amusing, tossed him about, mauled him, took him apart. Above his friend was screaming, until his parents took him home, quieted him. But he became morose, refused to eat, would awaken shrieking that the bears were tearing him to pieces. Last week they led him, docile, to the Berne insane asylum, his intellect disorganized.

*Sometimes his remedies are simple. To a self-pitying businessman, full of fears and excitements: "You're just a plain damn fool." "That's just what I needed to be told," cried the patient, cured.