Perhaps unwisely, I have accepted a mandate to discuss "The Practice of Psychiatry." The mandate includes an attempt to stake out the legitimate scope and limitations of psychiatry and decrees the expression of an opinion concerning its benefits and hazards, its blessings and its dangers to the patient. It is a large order.
It is not particularly difficult to discover the surgeon, ophthalmologist or other specialist and to orient him more or less securely in the natural fields of his labors. The psychiatrist is much more elusive and is too often confusingly protean. Now and again one may find him valiantly defending the citadels of endocrinology; mayhap of more sober mien, he may be deeply immersed in abstract psychologic considerations. He may be the concise and businesslike efficiency expert; he may be enlisted in the ranks of child guidance; mental hygiene may have gained his devotion, or psychoanalysis may have