that psychiatry should have erred in some respects.
We had forced upon us the herding together of larger numbers of patients
than can possibly be handled by one human working unit or working group.
The consequence was that there arose a narrowing routine and wholesale
classifications and a loss of contact with the concrete needs of the
individual case; that very often progress had to come from one-sided
enthusiasts or even outsiders, who lost the sense of proportion and
magnified points of relative importance until they were supposed to
explain everything and to be cure-alls. We are all inclined to sacrifice
at the altar of excessive simplicity, especially when it suits us; we
become "single-taxers" and favor wholesale legislation and exclusive
State care when our sense for democratic methods has gone astray. Human
society has dealt with the great needs of psychiatry about as it has
dealt with the objects of charity, only in some ways more stingily, with
a shrewd system and unfortunately often with a certain dread of the
workers themselves and of their enthusiasm and demands. Law and
prejudice surrounded a great share of the work with notions of stigma
and hopelessness and weirdness--while to those who see the facts in
terms of life problems there can be but few more inspiring tasks than
watching the unfolding of the problematic personality, seeking and
finding its proper settings, and preventing the clashes and gropings in
maladjustments and flounderings of fancy and the faulty use and
nutrition of the brain and of the entire organism.

What a difference between the history of a patient reported and studied
and advised by the well-trained psychiatrist of to-day and the account
drawn up by the statistically minded researcher or the physician who
wants to see nothing but infections or chemistry and hypotheses of
internal secretion. What a different chance for the patient in his
treatment, in contrast to what the venerable Galt of Virginia reports as
the conception of treatment recommended by a great leader of a hundred
years ago: "Mania in the first stage, if caused by study, requires
separation from books. Low diet and a few gentle doses of purging
physic; if pulse tense, ten or twelve ounces of blood [not to be given
but to be taken!]. In the high grade, catch the patient's eye and look
him out of countenance. Be always dignified. Never laugh at or with
them. Be truthful. Meet them with respect. Act kindly toward them