558 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



regeneration of the city and that the mortality from all diseases has 

 been reduced to an unprecedented figure. We know that efforts for 

 the public welfare often produce results where they were least expected, 

 and so, the different fields of preventive medicine, special as some of 

 them seem to be, are really inseparably related. Contrary to general 

 belief, the prevention of insanity is not a matter which depends upon 

 such special factors that it does not concern us all. It is, instead, only 

 a phase of the general warfare against preventable disease; it has points 

 of contact with many familiar problems of sanitation and, as will be 

 shown, it bears a fundamental relation to two social questions which 

 are occupying a very large place in the public attention at the present 

 time. 



The prevention of insanity is a matter well worthy of some con- 

 sideration, for it is doubtful if any other human infliction can produce 

 keener distress. A better conception of the nature of disorders of the 

 mind and a kindlier attitude toward the insane have done a great deal 

 to improve the lot of the sufferers themselves, but nothing can do 

 much to lessen the unhappiness which insanity brings to others. It is 

 difficult to tell exactly how prevalent insanity is. A few years ago 

 some writers, who failed to take account of factors which greatly modi- 

 fied their statistics, startled the public in England by showing that the 

 total number of the insane was increasing at a much more rapid rate 

 than the general population, and one of the more gloomy of these 

 writers did not hesitate to predict that insanity would ultimately en- 

 gulf the race. It was, of course, absurd to ignore the effect, in increas- 

 ing the aggregate number of insane persons under treatment, of an 

 increasing readiness to seek institution treatment on account of the 

 enormous advances in standards of care, of the earlier recognition of 

 mental diseases and of the effect of building more hospitals, thus afford- 

 ing ready access for cases not often committed to distant institutions. 

 At the close of 1908, there were 30,456 patients in the public and 

 private institutions for the insane in New York state; about one in 

 280 of the general population of the state. This is approximately the 

 ratio which exists in neighboring states and, it happens, exactly the 

 same as the ratio in England. This number is not, fortunately, a satis- 

 factory index of the prevalence of mental diseases, for the reason given 

 and because the duration of some mental diseases is so great, in patients 

 who do not recover, that the aggregate number under treatment at any 

 given time represents, in large measure, the accumulation of unrecov- 

 erable cases admitted in former years. A patient died recently at the 

 Utica State Hospital who had been admitted in 1843; she had been 

 counted in 65 annual enumerations. The number of patients ad- 

 mitted for the first time to any hospital for the insane during a speci- 

 fied period is a much more trustworthy guide. Last year 5,301 patients 



