From the standpoint of accurate description the opinion may be ventured that there is a gap in the literature from the early French writers and Newington up to the paper by Kirby, which has been discussed in the first chapter. This gap is filled by literature of the German schools and their adherents in other countries. German psychiatry has been concerned mainly with classification or the elaborate examination of certain symptoms. Inevitably such a program militates against detached objective clinical description. It is hard to record symptoms that interfere with classification. German psychiatry has tended to make the insane patient a type rather than an individual. Hence the gap in the descriptive literature of stupor. The necessity of establishing the possibility of some stupors having a good prognosis has arisen from Kraepelin’s work. He can rightly be viewed as the father of modern psychiatry because he introduced a classification based on syndromes and taught us to recognize these disease groups in their early stages. Inevitably with such an ambitious scheme as the pigeon-holing of all psychotic phenomena some mistakes were made. Most of these appear in the border zone between dementia præcox and manic-depressive insanity. The latter group being narrowly defined, the former had to be a waste basket containing whatever did not seem to be a purely emotional reaction. Clinical experience soon proved that many cases which, according to Kraepelin’s formulæ, were in the dementia præcox group, recovered. Adolf Meyer was one of the first to protest and offered categories of “Allied to Manic-Depressive Insanity” or “Allied to Dementia Præcox,” as tentative diagnostic classifications to include the doubtful cases. Difficulties with stupor furnish an excellent example of the confusion which results from the adoption of rigid terminology. The earlier psychiatrists were free to regard a patient in stupor as capable of recovery as well as deterioration. When Kahlbaum included stupor with “Catatonia,” the situation was not changed, for he did not claim a hopeless prognosis for this group. But when Kraepelin made catatonia a subdivision of dementia præcox, all stupors (except obvious phases of manic-depressive insanity) had to be hysterical or malignant. Faced with this dilemma psychiatrists have either called recoveries “remissions” or, like E. Meyer, claimed that one-fifth or one-fourth of catatonics really get well. As a matter of fact it seems clear that stupor is a psychobiological reaction that can occur in settings of quite varied clinical conditions. It is not necessary to detail publications describing stupors in hysteria, epilepsy, dementia præcox or in the organic psychoses. It may be of interest, however, to cite some examples of acute, benign stupors and the discussion of them which appear in the literature of recent years.