HEALTH AND DISEASE 35 I 



ment with the iodine compound thyroxin produced in the thyroid gland, 

 and this glandular therapy had actually succeeded in salvaging those who 

 for centuries had been considered lost souls, visions of a new day for all 

 the mentally disabled loomed on a blurred horizon. 



"The diseases of the mind," said Cicero, "are more numerous than those 

 of the body." The ancients recognized this, yet for convenience divided 

 all mental ailments into two classes. The individual was either melancholic 

 or manic. In mania, said Aurelius, the head was disordered; in melancholia, 

 the stomach. This classification, in more or less modified form, lasted until 

 the nineteenth century. Then many began to make careful studies of the 

 mentally sick, watching their histories, listening to the language of lunacy, 

 and daily recognizing new groups of symptoms. Descriptive psychiatry 

 became the dominant form of investigation in this field, and reached its 

 highest peak about fifty years ago in the work of Emil Kraepelin, a pioneer 

 in experimental psychology of which Wundt, his teacher was the father. 

 From a mass of classic case histories he drew a new classification of the 

 insanities, which included as its two most important groups the manic- 

 depressive and the dementia praecox. The latter is now commonly termed 

 schizophrenia. 



Manic-depressive insanity is a psychosis of adults. It begins with nervous- 

 ness, restlessness, and emotional irritability, and ends in such morbid states 

 that incarceration becomes necessary. The afflicted often become suicidal 

 or homicidal. Schizophrenia, the most frequent form of insanity, usually 

 begins at puberty or even earlier. The child becomes queer, shy, dreary, 

 seclusive, different, and a cleavage of the mind develops insidiously. An 

 internal break in the harmony of the personality occurs; the individual be- 

 comes, in fact, a split personality. The adult grows even more sensitive 

 and suspicious and less capable of making concessions. The outer world 

 is gradually renounced, and the victim drifts into a realm of fantasy, de- 

 lusion, and hallucination. 



Various forms of schizophrenia have been classified. The catatonic va- 

 riety finds the victim plunged in a deep despondency followed by sudden 

 irrational excitement. He may refuse to talk (mutism), and to comply 

 with any request (negativism). He may adopt and maintain certain fixed 

 and peculiar positions such as keeping one arm outstretched for hours at a 

 time. These periods of depression and excitation vary both in length and 

 in suddenness of change. The paranoiac is recognized by fixed and systema- 

 tized delusions. The patient appears perfectly normal except on certain 

 topics. Reason seems preserved but sidetracked, as in this typical case: A 

 childless Russian woman is being tortured every night in her sleep by oper- 

 ations removing children from her body, and she believes that her husband 

 cooperates to get children for scientific experimentation. Otherwise she is 

 apparently quite normal. 



Dismissing both the extravagant belief of Watson that "we do not inherit 



