pathology can yield.

These studies in pathogenesis and etiology are fundamentally necessary
for the development of a rational therapy and prophylaxis. Already much
that is of applicable value in practice has been achieved. The internist
shares with the psychiatrist the desire that knowledge of the facts
regarding care, cure, and prevention of mental disorders may become
widely disseminated among medical men and at least to some extent among
the laity. Experts in psychiatry firmly believe that at least half of
the mental disturbances now prevalent could have been prevented, if,
during the childhood and adolescence of those afflicted, the facts and
principles of existing knowledge and the practical resources now
available could have been applied.

We have recently had an excellent illustration of the benefits of
applied psychiatry in the remarkable results achieved during the great
war through the activities of the head of the neuropsychiatric division
of the Surgeon General's office and his staff[10] and those of the
senior consultant in neuropsychiatry and his divisional associates in
the American Expeditionary Force. In no other body of recruits and in no
other army than the American was a comparable success arrived at, and
the credit for this is due to American applied psychiatry and its wisely
chosen official representatives.

The active campaign for the preservation of the mental health of our
people and for a better understanding and care of persons presenting
abnormal mental symptoms carried on during the past decade by the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene marks a new epoch in preventive
medicine.[11]

The prevention of at least a large proportion of abnormal mental states
through the timely application of the principles of mental hygiene is
now recognized as a practically realizable ideal. Many important reforms
are now in process throughout the United States, no small part of them
directly attributable to the active efforts of our leading psychiatrists
and to our National Committee's [Transcriber's note: original reads
'Committe's'] work. The old "asylums" are being changed into
"hospitals." Psychiatric clinics are becoming attached to teaching
hospitals and psychiatric instruction in the medical schools is being
vastly improved. The mental symptoms of disease now receive attention in
hospitals and in private practice and at a much earlier stage than
formerly. Even the courts, the prisons, and the ref