Psychopathology, in extending its studies to crime and the minor psychopathies, comes to deal more with the maladjustments of function than with their disorders and imperfections. Certain mental aberrations are regarded as “faulty reactions,” “regressions,” or “evasions of difficulties,” and much use is made of the conceptions of “attitude” and “psychological type.” From such a standpoint the alleged traumata is to be found in the social environment; it is social stresses and disharmonies that are blamed. The strictly Psycho-analytic School, in the theory of “censorship,” “repression” and “resistance,” assigns no less pathogenic significance to social contacts. It is not between mind and its physical environment that we find most psychopathic disharmonies. Disturbances in this adaptation point to organic disease or abnormality and are correspondingly intractable. It is with the relationships between mind and mind that psychopathology is chiefly concerned.

The relinquishing by Sir Frederick Mott of the offices of Pathologist to the London County Mental Hospitals and Director of the Laboratory is happily not the occasion for a funeral oration, nor does it connote a cessation of those wide activities in the world of neurology and psycho-pathology which have distinguished his career, of which his 18 years' mental hospital service forms only a part, howbeit an important one. On the contrary, as we announced in our last issue, he has accepted the appointment of Honorary Director of the Pathological Laboratory of the Birmingham City Mental Hospitals and Lecturer on Morbid Psychology at Birmingham's University. It thus happens that London's loss is Birmingham's gain, but what is more important, Sir Frederick Mott's services to scientific psychiatry are retained, and, we hope, for many years to come. In his case, as with many illustrious men who have adorned the learned professions, age has only served to broaden the outlook, to give insight, and to ripen wisdom, all of which psychological medicine sorely needs if it is to be a fruitful branch of the healing profession. His British Medical Association Lecture on Psychology and Medicine, delivered in November last (1), is illustrative of this fact, and that his pronouncements now are of more value than at any period of his career.

The serious outbreak of fire which occurred at the Manhattan State-Hospital, Ward's Island, New York, on February 18, resulting in the death of twenty-four patients and three nurses, recalls the terrible holocaust of Colney Hatch nearly twenty years ago. Although the Press reports which reached this country contained many inaccuracies, yet it is apparent that there are several features of similarity between the two occurrences.