Dr. Southard, preëminently a neuropathologist, is well grounded in organic neurology, and shows at every turn his capabilities for considering the neuroses, psychoses, and insanities from the standpoint of the neurologist. Moreover, he clearly shows training and insight into the problems of non-neurological internal medicine.
The ideal method of training a student for neuropsychiatric work--if one had the opportunity of directing his course from the time of his entry into medicine--would be to see to it, after a good grounding in the fundamental sciences like anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, that medicine and surgery in their broadest phases first received school and hospital attention; that the fields of neurology, pure and applied, were then fully explored; and that psychology and psychiatry received late but thorough consideration. When after America’s entrance into the world war the writer assisted in preparing medical reserve officers for neuropsychiatric service, those men did best both during their postgraduate work and in base hospitals and in the field, who had built from the bottom after the manner indicated.
At the outset of Dr. Southard’s book, for more than two hundred and fifty pages, the author considers under ten subdivisions the acquired diseases and constitutional defects which may predispose the soldier to functional and reflex nervous disease. Neurosyphilis, on which Dr. Southard and Dr. Solomon have already given us a valuable treatise, the pharmacopsychoses, especially alcoholism, and the somatopsychoses covering fevers like typhoid and paratyphoid, are considered in numerous carefully chosen case reports. The reader needs only to look closely into the case records of the first quarter of the volume to get a knowledge of the affections chiefly predisposing the soldier or civilian to functional and reflex nervous diseases. To those familiar with the medical history of the war it is well known that one of the reasons for the efficiency of the American Expeditionary Force resided in the fact that the preliminary examinations of the recruits received the fullest attention not only from the points of view of acquired and inherited disease, but also from those of special psychiatric and even psychological deficiencies. Our country, however, had for its guidance the experience of nations which were fighting for three years before we entered the arena and in addition had a large surplus of material from which to cull out the weaklings.