One hundred years ago

Dr. Krafft-Ebing’s Textbook of Insanity [Textbook of Insanity. By Dr. von R. Krafft-Ebing, late Professor of Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases in the University of Vienna. Translated from the last German edition by Professor C. G. Chaddock, M.D., of St. Louis University, with introduction by Frederick Peterson, M.D., President of the New York State Commission in Lunacy. Philadelphia; F. A. Davis and Co. 1905. (Demy 8vo, pp. 654. 4 dollars.)] has enjoyed such wide popularity, has run through so many editions, and has been for so many years the leading textbook of insanity in many Continental universities that an English translation cannot fail to be of great service to both English and American students. It is true that more modern writers, particularly Kraepelin and his school, are opening up fresh views, and bringing about gradual alterations in the classification of mental diseases, but Krafft-Ebing's work still is, and is probably destined for many years to be, one of the standard clinical expositions of the facts of morbid psychology. An indefatigable worker, a lucid and convincing writer, a master in the art of clinical description, and the discoverer of many important psycho-pathological facts, his appointment to succeed Meynert at Vienna was well merited, and the thirteen years of his professorship, which ended on his death three years ago, bore golden fruit in his lectures and this book. Needless to say, some of the early chapters in Book I in which the subject and aids of its study are treated, would have been amended in so far as they related to the underlying neural changes in the insanities, had the author lived, but these have been ably brought up to date by the translator, Dr. Chaddock. Book I and Book II deal respectively with the general and special pathology of the insanities and their treatment. Under the heading of General Pathology are treated the elementary anomalies of cerebral function in the affective, intellectual, and psycho-motor spheres; the causes of insanity; the course and prognosis of mental diseases, and general diagnosis and therapy. The treatment of these subdivisions is admirably concise and finely didactic. Book III, the last, gives the special pathology and treatment of insanity arranged according to the author's classification, which, like that of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain, is partly aetiological and partly symptomatological. It is more complicated than ours, but is much more complete. Under the first main division of the “psycho-neuroses” are considered melancholia, mania, primary curable dementia (stupor), primary hallucinatory insanity and secondary insanity and terminal dementia. “Psychic Degenerations” come next under review, and this part contains most excellent accounts of paranoia and the periodic insanities. In Part II of the “Special Pathology” mental diseases arising out of constitutional neuroses are discussed at considerable length and thoroughly elucidated. It is impossible to do more here than outline the system of classification adopted, but attention may be drawn to the author's masterly explication of this intricate subject, in which he evolves order from seeming chaos and knits up the ravelled sleave of overlapping symptoms. In this part, also, are considered imperative ideas which, it will be remembered, were first defined by Krafft-Ebing in 1876 and have, in most English textbooks, hardly been accorded their due importance. The chronic intoxications and the states of arrest of psychic development complete a work deservedly considered a classic. Illuminating footnotes and clinical records illustrate the text throughout, and theories and hypotheses have been, as far as possible, avoided. The clear style and comprehensible language of the author have been admirably translated into English by Dr. Chaddock, to whom are due the thanks of all students of psychiatry.