MENTAL HEALTH-PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE.

By Arthur Hiler Ruggles, M.D. 02. The Williams & Wilkins Company, Baltimore, 1934.

This book is a collection of lectures delivered by the author at Brown University in 1932.

The first lecture, Mental Health of thePast, outlines briefly the history of the changing attitudes of the peoples and the professions toward mental ill health. The past is for convenience divided into several periods. The first or primitive period is considered to extend from the beginnings of the race up to the time of Hippocrates. Then follow discussions of the GraecoRoman period, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The time between the Renaissance and the present is considered as a transition period during which mental disease is gradually recognized as a medical problem and suitable hospitals are erected for the care of the mentally ill.

The second lecture, Mental Health ofthe Present, begins with a relatively detailed and graphic account of the treatment accorded the mentally diseased in Rhode Island during the middle nineteenth century, and of the successful efforts of Miss Dorothea Dix to better the shocking conditions which she found at that time. The remainder of the lecture deals with the recent progress in psychiatry and with the growing utilization of psychiatric knowledge in connection with education, industry and law. Attention is called to the high and increasing incidence of mental disease, and to the fact that in spite of a much augmented understanding of such conditions the care given to those suffering from mental disease is still very largelycustodial in nature.

In the third lecture, Mental Health ofthe Future, the author indicates many ways in which the treatment of mental disease may be improved. The necessity for a program of research and education is urged that treatment may ultimately become curative and preventative in a much greater measure than obtains at present.