Borderlands of Psychiatry

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Stanley Cobb has taken up in this book certain subjects long neglected because they were neither orthodox medicine, nor psychiatry, nor neurology. Historically, psychiatry was for many years confined to the study and treatment of the legally insane, and the great problem in psychiatry will probably always be the committed hospital patients. Nevertheless, the problems in the borderland are extremely important, and only recently the psychiatrist has come out of the state hospital to take up the treatment of disorders of speech, emotion, and consciousness. At the time the book was written there were, in the United States, approximately six and a half million persons suffering from such disorders. It is with this large group that Cobb is concerned. The book will be most useful to medical students, to the average physician, and to social workers. It will also be valuable as collateral reading in nonmedical courses in psychology and related subjects.