'TIIE GENTLE ART OF MALINGERING.* THIS authors of this very
complete text-book have certainly earned the thanks of their profession and their work deserves to be .praised and recognized by all of us. They mt themselves to write out the whole thing from every point of view, and they have done -it thoroughly they have left•out nothing. The trials or offence or habit of malingering—conscious.er half-conscious—is doubtless az old as the hills, and as widely distributed over the earth. Indeed, most of us, in a subliminal sort of way, have the ingredients of it in us. The present writer, for instance, is not &deliberate humbug: lie would not plan and carry out a deliberate act of fraud but lie believes that, like Mrs. Gums:dila°, ho " feels it more," when some- thing hurts or partly cripples him. He is slow to leave off limping if his foot has been hurting him : he is horribly afraid of pain : he loves, when lie is poorly, to be put to hod and nursed. It would not take more than a touch of dishonesty to upset hin into the company of the malingerers.
But this groat text-book-is concerned not with the likes of him, bid with downright exaggeration, simulation, or self-infliction of disease or of injury. And, of course, in a book of this also and fulness, the legions of cases and tif instances are endless : they dance in the air of trails like tastes in sunbeams you begin to think that half the world is malingering. Thom was a time when the fault was supposed to be more or less limited to soldiers. Then carne railways, and railway _accidents • and brought into existence .a now school of claims for remuneration for shaken nerves and strained spines. Then came the Workmen's Compensation Acts, and the National Insurance Aot : and up sprang the taros of malin- gering, and.grow together with the wheat of honest claims. Every employer, every manufacturer, knows something of this offrneo. If-ho does not, he had bettor read this book, and -study the subject carefully.
The arrangement of the book is thoroughly sound and good. Itis-divided into five sections (1)General Consideration, historical, psychological, critical, and so forth. (d) Malingering in relation to the Nervous System a colossal subject, occupying two hundred pages. (3) Malingering in relation to Internal Diseases : and this is one.of the most valuable parts of the hook, because the dodges which it exposes are of recent invention and of bewildering ingenuity. (4) Malingering in relation to Injuries and External Diseases: simulation of accidents, of diseases of the skin, of hernia, of diseases of joints, lac. (5) Measures for Restriction of Malingering. This practical arrangement is as good as good could be. The hook has its faults : it is too fond of rhetoric, too fond of poetical quotations, too ambitious : it fails to recognise as it ought the work of Sir John Collie : the authors have that impetuous love of words which is 'their 'birthright as Welshmen. They idedisiate (no fault here) theiravork to-Mr. Lloyd George. An excellent chapter is contrihuted by Dr. W. M. Beaumont, on Malingering in relation to Sight.
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