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It is one of the failings of the otherwise so wholesome American tendency to give a prominent position to common sense experience in psychiatry that it is apt to lead to a neglect of the systematized fundamentals of psychiatry in nosological terms. Wittermann gives in concise presentation a combination of strict and unflinching allegiance to classificatory nosology and the practical points apt to figure at the beginning of the various disorders. One cannot help feeling that the student or physician who has mastered the successive discussions of the "diseases" has covered the field systematically. If there were an equivalent of "Living Age in Medicine," this presentation would deserve to appear in English garb.
First symptoms often are mistaken for causes and vice versa. The beginnings are usually slow but often latent, so that a flare-up is apt to be taken as an acute onset. The first issues are the dangers