LITERARY NOTICES. 



Regis' Manual of Mental Medicine. 1 



This is a prize volume, the first edition having been crowned by the 

 Paris Faculty of Medicine in 1886. With the author, we recognize in 

 this translation another step in the movement now so rapidly culminat- 

 ing which shall give us a true international science of psychiatry instead 

 of the more or less discreet fragments which now go by that name in 

 each of the several countries. It is true that psychiatry will in the 

 nature of the case always present a certain local coloring dependent 

 upon the phase of civilization which furnishes its materials; yet the 

 existing situation in which each country has its own school of mental 

 medicine and adheres to so great an extent to its own lines of psy- 

 chical research betrays an insularity which is hardly compatible either 

 with sound theory or successful practice. The volume before us may 

 be taken as a fair exponent of the present situation in France. The 

 first 28 pages are devoted to a historical sketch of mental pathology, 

 after which follows a detailed consideration of the general pathology 

 of mental alienation, occupying nearly 500 pages. The first two chap- 

 ters are devoted to general considerations, the third to classification. 

 The author introduces this chapter with the malicious remark of Buchez, 

 " Whe^n they think they have finished their studies, the rhetoricians 

 construct a tragedy and the alienists a classification," and then pro- 

 ceeds to develop an entirely new scheme of his own. We quote his 

 summary at considerable length. 



"I. The conditions of mental alienation are susceptible of be- 

 ing divided into two great classes : (1) functional alienations or insan- 

 ities ; (2) constitutional alienations or degeneracies. 



" The insanities subdivide into two groups : (1) generalized in- 

 sanities; (2) partial insanities. The generalized insanities comprise in 

 their turn three genera : (1) mania (species: subacute, acute, hyper- 

 acute, chronic, remittent and intermittent mania) ; (2) melancholia 

 (species : subacute, acute, hyperacute, chronic, remittent and inter- 



^egis, E. A Practical Manual of Mental Medicine. Authorized trans- 

 lation from the; second French edition by H. M. Bannister. Utica, N. Y., 

 Press of Am. Jour, of Insanity, 1894. 



