profession has never been able to do,—induce those who frame our laws to provide medical treatment for defective delinquents instead of merely locking them up for the protection of society. It would seem, moreover, that the time has come when the public should insist that the mental condition of persons accused of crime be made a medical rather than a legal question exclusively. CHAPTER VIII THE ETIOLOGY OF MENTAL DISEASES In reviewing the history of medicine there is nothing more discouraging than the references found in literature to the views entertained from time to time relative to the cause of mental diseases. To a certain extent this may be looked upon as an index of the progress of civilization. It must be admitted that it is at the same time, nevertheless, a reflection upon the medical profession which has never shown the interest in psychiatry that the importance of the subject warrants. It has been suggested that mental diseases did not play a prominent part in ancient history, owing to the fact that the law of the survival of the fittest automatically eliminated the insane and defective. As Tuke[56] says, "They perished in the course of nature, or were stamped out of existence; many of the perverse and morally insane were stoned to death; war destroyed a large number of feeble persons; while the Romans deliberately, and in the interests of the race, threw down from the Tarpeian Rock the children who were unfit to live." The papyri of the fifteenth century before Christ show clearly that the doctrine of demoniacal possession was generally entertained at that time.