This small book is composed of brief lectures delivered at the neuropsychiatric clinic of the Charité Hospital in Berlin. These lectures are intended to aid psychiatrists and neurologists in coming to decisions about sterilization in accordance with the new National Socialist laws. The subjects covered are feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, epilepsy, heredodegenerative nervous diseases and alcoholism. A final chapter deals with the technic of sterilization. The fact is stressed that in sterilization of women a laparotomy is always necessary.
All the lectures are rather sketchy, and they have little scientific or practical interest. Despite the efforts of the authors, the inadequacy of present knowledge concerning the rôle played by the hereditary factor in neuropsychiatric diseases and the difficulties involved in its utilization for their prevention become apparent. As a matter of fact, the problems of the heredity of mental disease are so difficult that it is perhaps not a bad