In a still more general way, the successful practitioner in medical cases as distinct from surgical, consciously or otherwise, uses the prin ciples of psychology in a very large proportion of his practice. One need not attempt the laborious task of specification here, for every practitioner must nowadays realize to some ex tent the mental factors in every complex disease.
The Need of Psychological Instruction for Breadth.— In all departments of the sci ence of medicine there is always an urgent demand for a broader outlook than the average medical student can obtain without a prelimi nary college course. It is easy to underesti mate the influence and the importance to human ity of the profession of medicine.
Medical philosophy reaches out into almost every aspect of human relationship, and thus it pervades, and in considerable part directs, every phase of modern human society. That it does not do so to even a greater extent than it does is largely because the nature of person ality is not adequately studied in the medical school. Many phases of the individual are of ten exhaustively considered, but at present it is no one's business to combine these scattered parts into the wholeness of the individual child or man or woman. And yet every patient is an individual, a personality, and has a heart and kidneys and nervous system and all the rest only as parts ministering to this It is one of the important tasks of the medical psychologist to weave these scattered threads of organic knowledge into this actual Then at last the average physician will know. in some measure at least, how to follow the sound advice of the numerous orators at com mencement who advise the graduates °to treat not the disease but the individual suffering from the disease." The somatic aspects of the Mal are adequately treated in many, and perhaps in most essential, respects, but of the inner side of the care of personality" one hears but little as yet from the teaching faculties of medicine The tide, however, is coming in! The psychology of sex is a phase of educa tion for which there is continually a more o5. vious demand from a grossly wronged and de graded society, and consequently from edu cators.
The course in legal medicine in the medical schools demands for its greatest usefulness the basis of psychological knowledge which should precede it in the curriculum. Human misery
and crime often depend on motives more psych ical than physiologic.
Psychology's Influence on the Physician Personally.— Medical instruction in psycholog undoubtedly would make the physician more sympathetic with his patients than sometime he now is. With this added sympathy he would serve them better because more understand ingly. He would tend to approach then the ideal of the oldtime family practitioner, •guide philosopher and friend.° Knowledge of the processes and relations of mind would be tc the physician himself a source of great and unending satisfaction. Related to it is not the knowledge of human nature, that never tiring source of interest and delight, but psy chology leads outward in all directions into the true wisdom of divine philosophy.
In 1913 the American Psychological Asso ciation, by a committee, investigated the status of psychology in American medical schools One of the questions asked the deans related to the advisability of special instruction in psy chology. Of the 71 schools (only 71) answer ing this question, 73 per cent replied in the affirmative, 12 per cent in the negative, while 15 per cent gave a qualified answer one way or the other. How slow is the recognition that emotions and ideas control the body ! Psychology in Relation to Psychiatry.— It is obvious that the medical care of insanity cases, if more than "asylum° is to be offered these "unhappy" routs, must depend as much on the physician's knowledge of psycholog as on somatic medicine. At present it is in a widespread area of our country nothing less than a reproach that so few professional chologists are trying to relieve and to cure the insane. In every case, from the irrational paranoiac to the terminal dement, much knowledge of the normal mind would seem to be a not wholly unreasonable requirement in an attending physician ! As yet the percentage who have such knowledge is so small as to con stitute a reproach to organized medical ef5 ciency and nothing less than that. Even the superintendents of these institutions conducted for the cure or the care of diseased minds are seldom or never psychologists. And still many of the hospitals have no such modern improve ment about the place.