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It has been proved that the state of piety possesses a direct curative value through its capacity to exhilarate or pacify, according to the needs of a disordered mind. As a potent form of suggestion, it lends itself to the uses of psychiatry; it may be medicinally employed as a tonic, stimulant, or sedative.
"And with you, Father," he murmured. Antoine Courcy was one of those who are fitted and trained by nature for the cure of souls. If you had spoken to him of psychiatry he would not have understood you. The long word would have been Greek to him. But the thing itself he knew well. The preliminary penance which he laid upon Pierre Duval was remedial.
Then he dated me up for a luncheon at which three of the biggest mental specialists in New York will be present, to talk over the manner in which psychiatry will aid my research! I can't say how tickled I am over his attitude." Next letter: "At ten reached Dr. Pierce Bailey's, the big psychiatrist, and for an hour and a half we talked, and I was simply tickled to death.
Psychiatry, during recent years, has found it to its advantage to turn to related sciences and allied branches of study for the explanation of a number of the peculiar symptoms of abnormal mental states. Of these related studies, none have been of greater value than those which throw light on the mental development of either the individual or the race.
According to his age or ability these speculations give us alchemy or chemistry, astrology or astronomy, magic or religion, spiritism or psychology, the were-wolf or psycho-analysis, phrenology or psychiatry, and so on.
This latter interest has two main sources of origin: I am deeply interested in the question of stuttering because of my general interest in neurology and psychiatry, including the speech disorders, under which heading stuttering finds its place; I have myself, from earliest childhood, suffered from this affection and so find myself naturally much interested in the subject.
The volume opens with a brief but fitting Introduction by Dr. Adolf Meyer, Director of the Clinic, a man to whom American psychiatry owes so much for the stimulus and inspiration which he has injected into others.
When Kraepelin included it in his large group of Dementia præcox, however, it implied that stupor could not be an acute, recoverable condition. He unquestionably advanced psychiatry greatly but his scheme was too ambitious to be accurate. Many observers saw patients, classified as dements according to Kraepelin’s formulæ, return, apparently normal, to normal life.
When professors of psychiatry removed the brains of pigeons and monkeys by vivisection, and, after curing the creatures, exhibited them at international psychological congresses, devoting the most sincere attention to the study of their psychical reactions, observing the attitudes of their bodies, their activity of perception, and similar things all really believed that an animal without a brain could throw light upon the psychology of man!
We may confidently expect that a more pronounced mastery over diseases of the mind will come when physicians in general are taught psychiatry clinically, so that the beginnings of mental alienation may be intelligently met by the family practitioner. The supreme achievement of the medicine of the Nineteenth Century undoubtedly has been the development of its preventive feature.
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