tory. But history is so full of lies that I often turn from it for instruction and consolation to those old legends of things that never happened, which are yet nearer the truth than history. And here I am reminded of one of St. Thomas in India, trite and old I know, and you have heard it before, but I feel that I too am old and trite, and as this legend carries a moral I may as well close with it as any.

Gondiforus, the king of the Indies, mistook St. Thomas for an architect a mistake often made in regard to superintendentsand giving the saint vast treasures he sent him into another province to build him a magnificent palace. St. Thomas knew nothing about architecture, but he was a saint nevertheless, and for two years he was spending his time and all that treasure in helping and converting the poor of the province. At the end of the allotted time the king came, and finding no palace, but his treasure squandered, he discharged Thomas as supervising architect, cast him into a dungeon, and decided to flay and burn him. Meantime the king's brother died, and the punishment was necessarily delayed until after the funeral. On the fourth day the dead man rose and said to King Gondiforus: "This man whom you mean to torture and to kill is the friend of God, and his angels do always serve him. In Paradise they have shown me a marvelous palace of gold and silver and precious stones; and when I admired its beauty they said to me, 'It is the palace that Thomas built for thy brother, but he is unworthy of it.""

Then the king released the saint, fell at his feet and besought that he would pardon him. And Thomas said, "There are in heaven palaces without number, which are prepared from the beginning of the world, and they are to be bought with faith and charity. Your riches, O, King, may go before you into heaven, but they cannot follow you there.

A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN MEDICO-PSYCHO

LOGICAL LITERATURE.

BY G. ALDER BLUMER, M. D.,

Medical Superintendent, Utica State Hospital, Utica, N. Y.

Fifty years ago this very month, Dr. Amariah Brigham, the first superintendent of the State Lunatic Asylum at Utica, N. Y., wrote to his friend, Dr. Pliny Earle, then superintendent of the Bloomingdale Asylum, New York, a letter in which the following interesting announcement was made:

"I am about starting an AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INSANITY, quarterly, 8vo, pages 96; edited by the officers of this asylum. The first number will be published early in July. It is intended for the general reader as well as for the profession. This is an entire secret, as I have mentioned it to no one but Doctor Beck of Albany."

While, therefore, the American Medico-Psychological Association is commemorating its semi-centenary it happens, in opportune coincidence, that the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INSANITY may also sound its trumpet-blast of jubilee, albeit the JOURNAL must pipe in a minor key. Indeed, all these long years it has depended mainly upon the Association for its very existence. After all, it has but borne the relation of score to musical composition. It is the record of the main achievements of American psychiatry since 1844. In a word, the JOURNAL is what the Association has made it, and in this view even an editor may be justified in experiencing a sense of pride, and raising the JOURNAL's voice to swell the jubilate of the Association on this festive occasion. But to me is assigned in the programme a vastly more difficult task than the mere shouting of huzzas. I am to show if I can the substantial foundations about which our emotions of joy and pride play-to review a half-century of American psychological literature, and to do it in a paper not to exceed twenty minutes in the reading! There is a sweet unreasonableness in the task, but the time-limit is as welcome to me as it no doubt is, for other reasons, to you, since I shall certainly be excused if I but skim the surface of things currente calamo and fall far short of doing justice to a theme that calls for not only an

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abler pen, an older head and a more critical judgment, but a longer association with the past history of this body than mine.

It will simplify our retrospect to avoid all reference to the living, however noteworthy the achievement of to-day, but even so, and confining our remarks to more or less definite epochs in our history, we can add, in token of gratitude and respect, but here and there a pebble to the literary cairn of the deceased brethren whose labors have made it possible to make this an occasion of rejoicing as well as of sorrow, of "weighing in equal scale delight and dole."

Dr. Amariah Brigham. In any consideration of the res gesto of the past half-century, there is one name that must ever stand out in bold relief in the fore-front. It is that of Amariah Brigham, who, in 1844, founded at private expense the first journal in the English language devoted to mental medicine as "a medium for whatever of value relating to this specialty he, in connection with his co-laborers in the field, could furnish." In view of the multiplicity of his duties as the head of a large institution, as yet imperfectly organized, as well as of the precariousness of his health, it was a bold and laudable undertaking. It is matter of history that he suffered alike in pocket and health by the enterprise, but he has left a monument of his genius and energy which can not fail to rebuke and incite those of us who, in the face of pressing administrative work, are too prone to find an excuse for the sacrifice of professional aspirations and a plea for literary and scientific indolence. Verily, of that early period of great awakening it may be said "there were giants in the earth in those days, and also later than that." We perhaps appreciate too little now Doctor Brigham's judgment and foresight in originating the JOURNAL OF INSANITY, as shown by the fact that in those days the medical profession was far less acquainted with nervous diseases involving (or involved in) insanity. To the generality insanity itself was, if not a terra incognita, a trackless waste-dreaded and almost tabooed. This journal (and far be it from me to forget or ignore the great work done at a later period by such subsequent contemporaries as the Alienist and Neurologist, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and the rest) soon becoming the organ of the whole specialty in this country, and reporting the papers and discussions of our Association, served to concentrate and strengthen the scientific spirit of investigation and to give it purpose and consistency; for the

science itself, in which so much still remains to be done, was then really at a stage almost elementary and inchoate.

Upon the death of Doctor Brigham, the managers of the State Lunatic Asylum, fully alive to the importance of their deceased superintendent's enterprise, assumed the entire responsibility of its publication, and induced Dr. Romeyn Beck, one of their number, to edit the ensuing volume. He accepted the trust, and retained

his editorial connection with the JOURNAL until 1855.

Doctor Beck was a man of unusual scholarliness and won laurels on our own field through his " Elements of Jurisprudence," unequivocal evidence of the estimation in which that work was held by the profession having been furnished by the honor of translation into the German language.

Dr. John P. Gray, an equally able successor, pushed the design of its founder with characteristic energy, and for many years of the last half-century, by his arduous labors, both as medical officer and editor, greatly enlarged and enriched the literature of the subject, not only for our profession, but for the community. For Doctor Gray did not believe in limiting such knowledge as could be gained to his own co-laborers merely, so as to make the science and art of mental medicine what every special trade in mediæval times was called a "mystery," but he believed that some knowledge of the principles at least of psychiatry should be included in the curriculum of every medical college, that the whole medical profession might be fitted at least for the duties which the law imposes upon them in connection with the commitment of patients proper for a hospital. If we mistake not he was one of the first to give courses of lectures on the subject in two of the medical colleges of the State of New York. And we believe he was the first to advocate and procure the establishment of a department of pathological research in connection with our hospitals for the insane-a proposal in which he was perhaps somewhat in advance of his time, but which the further progress of physiological and pathological investigation has abundantly justified. I say "physiological and pathological" and advisedly, for, in our specialty perhaps more than in any other, that sagacious dictum of Professor Foster may be realized, that "All distinctions between physiology and pathology are fictitious-attempts to divide them are like attempts to divide meteorology into a science of good and bad weather." And while it may seem an almost impossible task to get at the basis of consciousness

and of its disorders from an objective material standpoint, it is surely a hopeful sign of the times that laboratories are now multiplying in asylums throughout the land, and that brainy, young alienists are at work patiently and intelligently with their microscopes along lines of activity which were mapped out long ago, striving, in vicarious atonement for a previous generation's apathy to wipe out such reproach as some of our more progressive brethren have lately laid at our door But, alas, how lamentably frequent is the experience when a spirit of sneering cynicism is combined in the same superior mentor with an alluring gift of literary facility, that the good that our dead have done "is oft interred with their bones." Those who knew the late Doctor Gray-and there are many of them here to-day-must have been aware how very definitely he made up his mind on any question that might come before him, and how vigorously he was able to maintain his convictions against all comers. But those who were in his confidence also know that no man could be more eager and ambitious to learn where anything was to be learned, and more quick to discern in what particular directions more knowledge was to be desired.

And may it not be said of the best known men of the past halfcentury that while they were keenly alive to the rapidity of modern progress (which, in some cases, seems to develop only a sort of pragmatical pride and Philistinism), yet in their most sanguine speculations or deductions they ever evinced that spirit of modesty which is said to be the characteristic of true science? The history of panaceas in the past, and the explosion in our day of theories. fondly cherished in another, ought indeed to be enough to secure this result, though the failure of anticipated discoveries and experiments need not drive any one to the opposite extreme of scientific agnosticism or nihilism. Rather should we study, and avail ourselves of, the hygienic uses of the imagination on those lines laid down by Sir J. Crichton-Browne in his masterful address at Leeds five years ago, where he says: "The pilgrim of imagination may stand long knocking at the portal, but if he prevails the gates fly open in a twinkling and the whole glory of the vision is at once declared," and where he bids us cherish imagination till it mounts into faith and reveals to us "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Such views and such exhortations may very naturally generate a temper of the most sanguine and extravagant optimism, but they are surely justifiable if always accompanied by the sober restraints of reason and philosophy.