SANITY OF MIND.
Sanity of Mind. By David F. Lincoln, M.D. (G. P. Putnam's Sons. 5s.)—This is a work of an increasing class, dealing as it does with the sad and seamy side of our civilisation. We are paying an immense price for that civilisation, and the question comes as to whether that price can be reduced. Dr. Lincoln, an American physician, thinks it can. He faces the facts, not only of insanity properly so-called, but of the weak, aimless mind, joined to a feeble bodily organisation, and he says that the out- look may be regarded in a fairly optimistic spirit. One cannot help feeling, however, that the basic ideas which he sets forth as furnishing the right conditions for a healthy mind are not by any means in complete harmony with the conditions of modern industrial life. The keynote of the book may be summed up in one word,—spontaneity. To develop that in every human being should be the end of physical and mental education. Every human being a spontaneous self-governing unit,—that is Dr. Lincoln's ideal. But on the other hand our industries tend to make of men machines, while our increasing town life prevents the average man from enjoying that kind of early training which is here recommended as conducive to sanity. It is here that this otherwise excellent work fails, in that it does not, like Dr. Poore's "Rural Hygiene," e.g., show what physical conditions are bound up with good health. At the same time, there are many good suggestions as to the treatment of the feeble in mind and in body. More might have been said about diet, but what is said is judicious. Perhaps the central idea in the book as to the treatment of the partially sane is that their minds and bands should be constantly employed with such light work as they are capable of doing. More reliance is placed on mental and moral than on purely bodily treatment, and the rousing of the torpid and self-centred spirits of the invalid is rightly insisted on. For the sake of the future, marriage of unfit persons is deprecated to a degree that some perhaps would be inclined to consider as extreme. We agree, however, that perfect frankness before marriage is right and necessary. Altogether a wholesome work, scientific, practical, and humane.
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