This case is placed among the medicolegal and social cases because the phenomena that ushered in his last illness were mistaken by the local public for meritorious social reform measures. They were regarded as not markedly different from the variety of steps taken by the very active doctor in previous years; indeed the public eloquence that he displayed a year before his death was quite in line with previous habits, despite the suspicious over-brilliance of language. It is an important question, how far the eccentricity and literary overactivity of the latter half of the doctor’s total life can be explained on the basis of a mild syphilitic irritation of the nervous system. In this connection we are tempted to recall the suggestions of Mœbius concerning a portion of the literary products of Nietzsche. Our doctor was by no means so brilliant an exemplar of syphilitic literature as was Nietzsche, if we grant the hypothesis of Mœbius to cover our doctor’s case as well as that of Nietzsche. In the future, important studies of character change under the influence of syphilis will doubtless be made. With modern diagnostic methods, of course, the diagnosis would have been rendered almost at once in the case of Major Isaac Thompson, M.D., and much of his past life would have been brought under special review in connection with the syphilis which doubtless the blood serum or at any rate the cerebrospinal fluid would have shown. This case illustrates but one of the many social complications arising as the result of paresis. When one recalls that the onset is often insidious and not correctly understood for a period of time, it is readily seen that many unfortunate acts may be committed by a patient. As hypersexual desire is not an infrequent early symptom and as judgment is early disturbed, loose morals may ruin the patient’s reputation. The poor judgment and expansive delusions often lead to foolish business deals wherein the patient’s family is left destitute. At other times the onset is sudden and then the danger of false commands or acts by a person in a responsible position, as a steamship captain, an engineer or chauffeur, may lead to loss of life and property. =Sudden grandiosity: debts. PARETIC NEUROSYPHILIS (“general paresis”): Question of liability.= =Case 84.= Lester Smith was a salesman, 31 years of age, who, while on a business trip, accompanied by his wife, suddenly developed grandiose ideas. He originated a scheme of cornering the phonograph market. His prospects seemed so certain to him, that he hired an expensive suite of rooms in a hotel at something over $35 a day. As at the first presentation of his bill it was found that he had no money to meet these charges, he was taken into custody and at once transferred to a hospital for the insane, where it was discovered that he was suffering from GENERAL PARESIS.