Abstract

Recent Works on Mental Hygiene

This article critically appraises three recently published books on mental hygiene. These books are: "An Essay on the Principles of Mental Hygiene," by D.A. Gorton; "The International Scientific Series. Responsibility in Mental Disease," by Henry Maudsley; and "Principles of Mental Physiology. With Their Applications to the Training and Discipline of the Mind and the Study of Its Morbid Conditions," by William B. Carpenter. These three books are grouped together because the two latter are yet considered more important manuals of mental hygiene than the American volume which bears this title. This latter does not deal with didactic maxims, but is a concatenation of quotations, statistics, and propositions regarding the effect of different circumstances on the mental life, from which the reader is avowedly left to draw his own practical conclusions.