258 The Journal 
the proper segregation or treatment. 
The diagnoses which have been made 
at the laboratory include the following: 
Feeblemindedness, psychoses, psychic 
constitutional inferiority, drug addic- 
tions, sex perversions and inversions, etc. 
SOURCES OF PATIENTS 
Not all the cases investigated come 
from the “line-up,” however. The 
lieutenants in charge of some of the 
police precinct stations send patients to 
the psychopathic department directly, 
if it appears advisable. The city magis- 
trates frequently ask to have reports on 
some of the prisoners tried before 
them, before pronouncing sentence. 
The parole board refers many parole 
applicants to Dr. Bisch for examination. 
The courts of general as well as special 
sessions have taken a proper interest 
in this work and are sending certain 
prisoners to the psychopathic laboratory 
to be examined before sentence is 
passed. Another common source of 
subjects is a large number of people 
who call at headquarters insisting upon 
seeing the officials to ask their aid in 
various matters. Among these people 
frequently appears a so-called ‘“‘crank”’ 
or person suffering from some form of 
mental trouble. 
Often they are cases which might 
ordinarily escape detection for a long 
while. Quite recently, for example, a 
woman called to ask the’ police com- 
missioner’s aid in getting her son-in-law 
to support her daughter properly. Such 
a request seemed unexceptionable, but 
something in her manner aroused sus- 
picion, and she was induced to call upon 
Dr. Bisch. His conversation with her 
indicated that she was not wholly sane, 
and an investigator was sent to look 
up her family. She was found to be 
living with three relatives, all unbal- 
anced mentally, and with a child who 
was exposed to such a bad environment 
that his own mind was becoming 
disturbed. 
A more common type of case in which 
the psychopathic laboratory proves its 
usefulness is the following: A man who 
wrote to a large manufacturing concern, 
threatening to blow up their plant 
unless a sum of money was paid him, 
of Heredity 
was arrested and charged with 
attempted blackmail. Examination 
showed him to be insane; he really 
thought the firm owed him money for 
services rendered. He was sent to a 
hospital for the insane instead of to a 
prison. 
Another case is that of a man 36 
years old, found on the roof of a building 
and charged with attempted burglary. 
Anywhere else, the case would probably 
have attracted little attention; the man 
would have been convicted on a felony 
charge and sent to the penitentiary for 
at least a year, in a routine way, by a 
court too heavily loaded with work to 
give the case any individual attention. 
In this instance, the man was sent to 
Dr. Bisch, who found that he had 
received, years before, a blow on the 
head which had affected him mentally. 
To send him to prison would have been 
utterly useless; he was not responsible 
for his actions. Nevertheless, he talked 
intelligently on most subjects, had a 
good memory for incidents which hap- 
pened before his accident, and would 
have been passed as normal by anyone 
except a trained scientific observer. 
AN INTERESTING CASE 
One of the most interesting cases 
which the laboratory has handled is 
that of F. B., a young man of excellent 
parentage, who had been brought up 
in a very good environment with every 
care and advantage which intelligence 
and a comfortable income could provide. 
He was arrested for turning in a false 
alarm of fire, and it was found that he 
had also set ten or a dozen fires which 
had destroyed buildings in the neighbor- 
hood. In many respects he gave the 
appearance of being normal mentally, 
but Dr. Bisch’s examination showed that 
he was suffering from an insanity. His 
parents were people of good standing 
and superior intelligence, but the family 
history investigation disclosed the fact 
that’ certain other ancestors had been 
of a somewhat similar neurotic constitu- 
tion, though their condition is not 
believed to have brought them before 
the law. Obviously this boy did not 
belong in prison. He was sent to a 
hospital for mental and nervous diseases, 
