Ladies and Gentlemen,—I rise, as your President, with a feeling of what the older physicians called præcordial anxiety, chiefly because I am not a teacher of psychiatry, but merely a clinical physician, and therefore possibly may have no real mandate from the gods to address you, except that which I owe to the kindly hearts of my fellow members of our great Association. Whatever work I have done in Ireland in helping to keep alive our interests in psychiatry you have bounteously rewarded, and I heartily thank you, on my own behalf, and also on behalf of the Irish Division, for the great honour you have conferred upon me. The old Shakespearian tag says: “Some are born great, and some achieve greatness,” but I assuredly have had this “greatness thrust upon me.” It is difficult, all must admit, to leave “footprints in the sands of Time,” and, to one who succeeds such men as Conolly Norman, Dawson and Nolan—all Irish Presidents—the task is not easy. The older members will easily remember Sir Thomas Clouston, Dr. Urquhart, of Perth, Sir George Savage, and many others who have kept alive the knowledge of psychiatry and amply added to it, and we, who speak to you in, possibly, “childhood's treble tones,” and look at you through the oncoming “silvery fringes of the ‘arcus senilis,’” can only feel that the good work of clinical psychiatry will be carried on, in the curative interests of God's mentally afflicted, as it has been done in the past; and it will, I feel sure, be effectually perfected in the future by the younger members of to-day, graced with the present-day knowledge of biochemistry and the more modern methods of psycho-therapy.

The functions of the different layers of the neocortex are a matter of great importance to the neurologist.

The character of the neocortex and the significance of its different layers are, however, most easily understood when compared with the older forms of cortex, the primary olfactory cortex, which I have called palœocortex, and the secondary olfactory cortex or archicortex.

In acquiescing to Dr. Leeper's request that I should produce something for this Meeting, I thought that the best subject would be the relation of insanity to the parturient state. It is interesting to find that the description of the symptomatology of this disease only dates from 1875, when Fürstner (1) first described it.

Our conceptions of how the organs of the body work are primarily derived from experiments done on muscle, the organ from which experimenters have been accustomed over many decades to ascertain the fundamental properties of living tissues; the principles there learnt have then been directly applied to the problems presented by other organs. Such having been, and still being, scientific practice, it follows that, if we find out about the working of muscle something fundamentally different from that hitherto suspected, we not only obtain therefrom new ideas of the working of muscle, but also new principles to apply to our ideas of the working of other organs. It could happen, however, that new knowledge concerning the fundamental working of the organs of the body should actually come from some other organ than muscle. In that case the newly discovered phenomena would not be directly explicable in terms of the fundamental principles derived from muscle. Two courses would then be possible. The discoverer could re-consider his fundamental principles, and thereby be led to reexamine the workings of muscle in the light of the information supplied by the other organ, or he could frame an ad hoc hypothesis concerning the supposed peculiar behaviour of the other organ. The latter has been the usual course followed, though it would not appear that the framing of such hypotheses has been made with full awareness that they really resolve conflict between principles derived from muscle and principles derived from the other organ.

The present paper is a forerunner of what is hoped may be many devoted to psychiatrical material by experimental psychologists of the Spearman School of Factors.

Reactions produced by experience fall into two great groups. The larger group consists of the reactions of those individuals whose mental mechanisms are accurately attuned to the demands of life; the smaller group is composed of the reactions of those unfortunates who are unable to adjust or adapt their mental processes to the ever-increasing complexities of civilization. The individuals forming the former group are called normal. Kræpelin termed the mal-adjustments of those in the latter group the “biogenic psychoses.”

In a recent publication entitled Schizophrenia (1928), issued by the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases, there are articles by thirty-one authors. The symposium contains 460 pages, of which only 18 are devoted to treatment. Does the ratio of 18 to 460 represent the relative interest existing in the treatment as compared with other aspects of the disease?

Sulfosin was first introduced by Schroeder (1) in the treatment of general paralysis and other syphilitic infections of the nervous system, and later its use was extended to the treatment of schizophrenia. He stated that the results were encouraging, and that this method of treatment was worthy of an extended trial. Loberg (2) treated 100 schizophrenic patients with sulfosin, and of these 49 had remissions in varying degrees. In a later report (3) he stated he had treated 135 patients, of whom 62 improved but only 12 had permanent remissions. Marcuse and Kallmann (4) treated 46 patients, 16 of whom were improved; Salinger (5) treated 16 patients, of whom 2 had remissions and 14 were unchanged.

This paper is an attempt to study the family and personal history of a schizoid individual, J. M—, who developed schizophrenia (dementia paranoides) at the age of 22.