stinctively that a real success can
be reached in every one of these fields, only if he possesses a
reasonable amount of knowledge of psychology. He feels that wherever he
touches the patient's body, examines his lungs or his heart or his
reflexes, that a large background of anatomical knowledge and of general
pathology gives meaning to every single observation. But in the field of
mental abnormities, in the whole world of ideas and emotions and
volitions, he simply lacks that background. Everything seems to him
without reference to real knowledge. He feels as amateurish as if he
were to operate on the abdomen without knowing its anatomy. He is
instinctively aware that even the simplest mental life represents a
bewildering complexity and that to stimulate ideas or feelings or to
suppress emotions, to inhibit volitions, must demand always a most
subtle disentanglement of the most widely different components. He
abstains from approaching that ground at all rather than to blunder by
his ignorance of psychology. And after all, he is right. But is he right
in allowing that ignorance? Can the medical profession afford to send
into the world every year thousands of young doctors who are unable to
use some of the most effective tools of modern medicine, and tools which
do not belong to the specialist but just to the average practitioner,
simply because they have not learned any psychology?

Indeed the times seem ripe for a systematic introduction of
psychological studies into every regular medical course. It is not a
question of mental research in the psychological laboratory where
advanced work is carried on, but a solid foundation in empirical
psychology can be demanded of everyone. He ought to have as much
psychology as he has physiology. Moreover the psychological study ought
not to be confined to the normal mental life. Again we do not speak of
psychiatry. What is needed is abnormal psychology, entirely independent
of the therapeutic interests of the alienist. The mental variations
within the limits of normal life and the borderland cases ought to be
studied there as well as the complete derangements. The ideal demand
would be that the future physician should spend at least a year of his
undergraduate time on empirical psychology, especially on experimental
and physiological psychology. He would take perhaps half a year's
lecture course on the whole field of psychology as covered in the
English language by the well-known t