266 PSYCHIATRY 



physiological factors in nervous and mental disease; his method 

 of reasoning from functional characteristics to interpret structure, 

 instead of inferring function through proofs in structure, is now 

 attracting renewed interest. 



These English views have long held a like formative place in 

 America where they have not lost but have sustained their force 

 during the decade since the introduction of German teachings. 

 Attention was first attracted especially to Kraepelin and the methods 

 at the Heidelberg clinic with a consequent intensification of inter- 

 est in morphological conceptions qualified by clinical observation. 

 The painstaking studies of Meyer and Hoch approached the sub- 

 ject from the neurological side loyal to the scientific method; 

 through their work the conceptions of Kraepelin were submitted 

 to the tests of practical cooperative study and experience with 

 results anticipating his own later simplifications of "disease-forms." 

 There was also, not only the establishment of collections of ad- 

 mirable clinical records, valuable for further study and analysis 

 in future, at the McLean Hospital and the Worcester Insane Hos- 

 pital where this special work began, but the extension of this clin- 

 ical method to many other hospitals. Later in the movement came 

 the different interpretations of psychiatrical problems by Wer- 

 nicke and Ziehen, the latter with an especially hopeful attitude 

 toward psychological explanations. There has appeared a tendency 

 to change in the views of these German teachers, of whom it is 

 said they "have emancipated psychiatry from the peculiar posi- 

 tion of an adjunct to neurology," a position for which the claim 

 has long been made and is not yet yielded. 



In the outcome of the decade in America the intensity of the 

 new teachings is being qualified by independent studies of the 

 problems involved, and the continuity of the current of earlier 

 views here has been maintained. This former trend has persisted 

 not only in psychiatry but it has appeared in neurology which was 

 formed in, and has held to, pronounced morphological concep- 

 tions. Dana, Putnam, and Prince, for example, have taken spe- 

 cial interest in the physiological and abnormal aspects of mental 

 phenomena. Herter has made the most noteworthy of contribu- 

 tions to the future understanding of mental as well as nervous 

 diseases, by studies of the chemistry of pathological physiology 

 and the disorders of nutrition and metabolism in seeking the 

 fundamental principles of practical therapy. Traceable here, as in 

 general medicine, is the influence of the immensely important work 

 of Chittenden; while this has little or no place in German teach- 

 ings of neurology and psychiatry, the chemical side of the com- 

 position and activity of nervous tissues is receiving attention in 

 England, in recent years, though the special studies of Mott and 



