134 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIV. No. 343. 



than the average practitioner of medicine 

 appreciates. Not mind controlling body 

 nor body controlling mind, but both to- 

 gether always sensitive to the stimuli of a 

 common environment combined into the 

 actual individual. 



The conventionalized and systematized 

 knowledge of conditions thus important in 

 treating disease is a portion of psychology. 

 Crude indeed are its names and its concep- 

 tions as crystallized in names compared 

 with the empirical reality, but it is of 

 necessity that they are crude and only rep- 

 resentative or symbolic that a science may 

 be constructed and discussed. A new med- 

 ical psychology adapted to its special use- 

 fulness would very soon develop a termin- 

 ology of its own, fitted to the case. The 

 term temperament, for example, vague and 

 little really explained by general psychol- 

 ogy, would, as a subject in medical psychol- 

 ogy and in the minds of physicians, soon 

 take to itself more explicit meaning, adapted 

 to its use. By this natural process of spe- 

 cialization of sense medical psychology would 

 suffer relatively little from that variation in 

 meaning among different writers, from 

 which general psychology (from the ab- 

 stract nature of its matter) suffers much 

 misunderstanding within itself. By thus 

 fixing the meaning of certain terms, and 

 that probably in more or less direct rela- 

 tion with concomitant somatic conditions, 

 medical science would do a distinct service 

 to empirical and physiological psychology, 

 and more substantially than any dictionary 

 could do it. 



A normal medical psychology, to be at 

 once scientific and comprehensive of the 

 field, would very likely set out with a rela- 

 tively brief exposition of genetic and of em- 

 pirical psychology, discussing thus in cer- 

 tain and uninvolved terms the classification 

 of mental processes under cognition, feeling 

 and will in the ordinary elementary way. 

 The more physiological in nature the treat- 



ment of this portion of the subject, the 

 better would the medical student connect it 

 with his knowledge of the body gained 

 earlier in his course. With these principles 

 of the science as a basis and point of de- 

 parture into allied branches of science, the 

 topics more immediately practical to the 

 physician might be taken up in a series as 

 much unified logically as possible. In this, 

 the immediately practical portion of the 

 work, the field would naturally and neces- 

 sarily spread out somewhat so that it would 

 be important to enter briefly at times into 

 anthropology (anthropometry especially, 

 perhaps), criminology and certain depart- 

 ments of biology, notably that regarding 

 the heredity of mental traits. Still, obvi- 

 ously, the greater part of the discussions 

 would lie strictly within the domain of psy- 

 chology as it is empirically studied to-day, 

 using for its own purposes, as it does, the 

 products of many different varieties of scien- 

 tific research. 



The topics of medical and surgical im- 

 portance which such a course might examine 

 into with benefit and interest are very many, 

 as any medical man will recognize. They 

 are subjects such as those below are ex- 

 amples of, placed here almost at random so 

 far as order is concerned, namely, tempera- 

 ment, mood, idiosyncrasy, pleasure, pain, 

 emotion, anaesthesia, hypochondriasis, dy- 

 namogeny, will power, sleep, subconscious- 

 ness, habit, sexual, racial and epochal dif- 

 ferences, suggestibility, hallucinations and 

 other scarcely abnormal phenomena of the 

 sense-organs and their neural centers. To 

 mention only suggestibility, the habits and 

 sexual psychology out of this list will per- 

 haps be sufficient to show how important a 

 course treating of such topics might be made 

 by a competent man. Continually is sug- 

 gestive therapeutics taking a larger share in 

 the treatment of certain chiefly psychical 

 diseases, and to explain its nature, uses 

 and limitations is to equip every physician 



