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The material studied comprised the histories of 380 patients selected as having psychoses from 7,000 admissions to the institution at Düsseldorf-Grafenberg between Jan. 1, 1924, and June 30, 1927. This hospital receives only adult persons and therefore, as the author points out, the results of the investigation cannot be applied statistically to cases of feeblemindedness in general. For various reasons the histories of 160 patients were excluded. Care was taken to exclude cases in which the feeblemindedness was accompanied by epilepsy or by alcoholism, morphinism, arteriosclerosis, paresis or other organic disease. The diagnosis of feeblemindedness was based on defective intelligence which was congenital or acquired in the earliest years and which was stationary. Psychopathic states were excluded and conditions were considered as psychoses only when—in accordance with the definition of Gruhle—the mental manifestations were new and foreign to the previous mental make-up of the patient.
The forms of the psychoses