The public attention has been of late very much directed to the subject of the ill effects resulting from lead intoxication in industrial workers brought into contact with this poisonous substance.

The section of Psychology at the British Medical Association meeting again discussed this subject, but apparently nothing novel of actual fact was adduced.

In a recent number of the Zeitschrift f. Psychiatrie (published in May, 1898) Möbius devotes an article to the memory of Heinroth (dead now fifty-five years), who is chiefly famous for the doctrine which he taught that mental disease arises from sin. He was, Möbius tells us, the first clinical teacher of psychiatry in Germany. It may therefore well be that he exercised an injurious effect, and that he was, as Kräfelin says, a dangerous enemy to the school of scientific psychiatry, then recently founded by Esquirol. Möbius, however, endeavours to point that he had nevertheless his merits. To us the matter is chiefly interesting as marking time. Such and such things a physician taught sixty years ago, and in the very next number of the journal which contains Möbius's historical notice we find how a priest writes to-day. In the Zeitschrift f. Psychiatrie published in June, 1898, there is a short review by the editor, Laehr, of a little work on “Pastoral Psychiatry” forming one of the volumes of an encyclopædia of Catholic theology, and setting forth views on sacerdotal work in asylums, which are published “with the approval of the Venerable the Vicariate-General of Freiburg, and of the Episcopal Ordinariate of Regensburg.” The author, Laehr tells us, frankly begins by saying that the physician must take the first place in dealing with the insane, and must have the direction of the treatment. Insanity is described as a disease of the brain, and the causal connection of the mental processes with brain conditions is said to be demonstrable by psycho-physics. The author modestly claims that there should be for every large asylum a special chaplain, so circumstanced that he could devote the necessary time to his work and spend as long as possible in the institution, for (the italics are ours, and they feebly express our feelings) “the acquisition of the necessary knowledge is not very easy, and the mode of intercourse with the various patients is not to be learned off-hand.” It is a pity that this sensible sentence could not be engraven on the tablets of memory for those occasional asylum committee-men who conceive that mere election on an asylum Board makes them familiar with the last results of science, and capable of teaching his business to the physician who has devoted his lifetime to the work. And we must earnestly commend to our older judges, and especially to those venerable denizens of the Gilded Chamber who are finally appealed to as the infallible exponents of the common law of England, the following excerpts from Father Ignatius Familier's work as given by Laehr:—“In all the many intermediate stages between mental health and complete insanity the freedom of the will is always limited in the same degree as the mind is affected. Therefore, such a person cannot be held entirely accountable for his actions, and is only responsible to a limited degree. If serious disturbances dominate any one region of mental activity, then complete irresponsibility must be held to exist, for the morbid errors of one mental sphere are almost never corrected by the part remaining in a better state, but on the contrary bring about a morbid condition of the entire personality” (das ganze Thun und Lassen krankhaft bestimmen). In a chapter “De Sacramentis” the author makes a most interesting distinction “between those lunatics who have been insane from their earliest infancy, and those who have been stricken by insanity after a longer or shorter period of sound mental health. The sacrament of Extreme Unction should never be administered to the former, for the possibility of committing a sin is taken from them by their irresponsibility. On the other hand, Extreme Unction must be administered to the latter when at all possible.”

Under this title Dr. James Russell, of the Hamilton Asylum, Ontario, read a paper before the American Medico-Psychological Association, and published it in the Canadian Practitioner for June of this year. He tells us that there is a growing tendency on the American continent to drop the term “asylum” in favour of the less suggestive title “hospital.” In the recently published transactions of that Association it would appear that the designation “hospital” is applied to ninety-three institutions, as against “asylum,” which is only used forty-eight times. In a peroration extending to nearly fourteen closely written pages, Dr. Russell inveighs against the disuse of the term “asylum.” His paper is redundant with digressions, which touch almost every conceivable point in the domain of psychiatry; many of his statements are highly controversial, while his discursive argument is open to destructive criticism both from those who differ from his conclusions and those who, for other reasons, adopt them. It is not, for instance, because we are afraid of “trusting too much to scientific methods,” as opposed to the use of the more general influences of occupation, recreation, and environment, which ordinarily abound in modern establishments for the care of the insane, that we prefer the name “asylum;” nor is it because we agree with Dr. Russell that an asylum hospital is an insignificant portion of the institution—amply large for the treatment of physical disease alone if it accommodate five per cent. of the asylum population—that we reject the general term “hospital.” On the contrary, we feel that we cannot have too much of “scientific method,” and we believe that an asylum of the present day ought to be largely an hospital in which from thirty to forty per cent. of the inmates are actively treated, medically observed, and constantly nursed. It is unnecessary, even if it were for edification, to follow Dr. Russell in his simple but crude classification of the insanities and his extraordinary therapeutic theories. We do not gather by what recondite means, apart from the humble medical appliances at our disposal, he proposes to “recharge the exhausted brain batteries of the melancholic with the electric current of thought,” or “chain and harness the overcharged batteries of the maniac to some mental or physical process.” We are far from agreeing with him when he asserts that because the pathology of systematised delusion has not yet been elucidated, it has therefore no morbid histology, no basis for medical treatment, and that it is merely an exaggeration of a condition which he unwarrantably asserts is only too common in “a world teeming full of paranoiacs everywhere.” Such opinions are not altogether novel. We have heard them more moderately, if not more ably expressed, but never perhaps with such wanton ardour and glorious disregard for contemporary opinion as distinguish their latest exponent.