Medicine: Man's Madness

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While last week's full lunatic moon shone out of sight on the far side of the earth, 1,800 members of the American Psychiatric Association congregated in St. Louis each day to consider the madness of mankind. In kind and quantity this has increased so rapidly during late years that more than half the nation's hospital capacity is devoted to care of the mentally deranged and in many States the cost of running insane asylums is one of the largest items in the annual budget.

That the stress and strain of modern living is to blame for this increased incidence of insanity, Dr. Clarence Orion Cheney of Manhattan, the Association's retiring president, seriously doubts. "As early as 1734.'' he told his colleagues in St. Louis, "stress and strain of modern life was given as a cause of mental illness." Dr. Cheney declared there is more insanity now simply because more people live long enough to go crazy.

Another authoritative psychiatrist, Dr. Lee Wallingford Darrah of Gardner, Mass., wondered if there is a mentally normal person in the whole world. "Can it be," he asked, "that there is no such paragon as the normal person? Many text books do not even list 'normal' in their index. Such definitions as have been given are widely open to criticism and the conclusion is reached that normality is very difficult to find."

To prove his point Dr. Darrah went to history, discovered some soft-headed doings by folk generally considered to have been quite hardheaded. "Queen Victoria," he revealed, "commanded that her dead husband's clothing be laid out afresh every evening, also water in his basin, and this astonishing rite was performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly 40 years. . . . [There was also] Disraeli, twice premier of England, whom Lytton Strachey describes as 'a vainglorious creature racked by gout and asthma, dyed and corseted with a curl on his miserable old forehead kept in its place all night by a bandana handkerchief!' . . . Kant, while living in Holland, lived in 13 different places and changed his abode 24 times; Voltaire [was] inordinately vain, unscrupulous, once a forger and seemingly ever tempted by suicide. . . . William James often thought of suicide."

Dr. Charles Macfie Campbell, ingoing president of the American-Psychiatric Association, toyed with the notion of lending psychiatry to statecraft when he asked: "In the sphere of politics and statesmanship, is it possible to make the present available knowledge of human nature of any practical effect? ... As a beginning one might arrange a special consultation service for legislators and statesmen, where they could get some insight into the problems of their own personality as an introduction to a proper understanding of their fellows."