When the tumultuous life of society is flayed into precedents and tanned into principles, the resulting abstractions suffer a strange fate. They are grouped and regrouped until the resulting mosaic may constitute a logical and aesthetic whole which has long ceased to bear any valid relation to the original reality. Concepts are constantly in danger of losing their reference to definite events. Notions like liberty and authority require a new birth of meaning after they have followed the tempting path of abstraction but a little way. If conceptions are to serve and not to master the mind, their terms of reference must intermittently undergo the most rigorous scrutiny. The use of “institutional” categories in describing political life is indispensable, but the publicists who employ them have little to say about the “personal” influences which modify the expected behavior of “legislatures,” “executives,” and “judiciaries.” It is no news that “leadership” is an important variable in predicting the course of events, but the standard treatises on politics have next to nothing to offer about the traits of various kinds of agitators and organizers, and nothing to say about the kinds of experiences out of which these differences arise. This limitation holds for the books about the theory of the state and of politics which are written by Englishmen like Sidgwick and Laski, Americans like Garner and W. W. Willoughby, and Europeans like Jellinek, Schmidt, Kjellén, and Kelsen. No doubt these men possess or have possessed a living sense of political realities. Of Sidgwick it is related that he was wonderfully adept in entertaining his circle for hours with incisive comments and amusing anecdotes about public men. But of this “humanity” of politics there is little to be found in what he wrote. Political biography has been relied upon chiefly to convey a sense of the unpredictable in human affairs, and to adorn an after-dinner tale. At its best, political biography has contributed to an understanding of the factors which differentiate one human personality from another. But it is no secret that the literary biography or autobiography omits or distorts much of the intimate history of the individual, and that many of the facts which modern investigators have found to be important are numbered among the missing. Where is it possible to secure a supply of life-histories in which the usual conventionalities are ignored, and which are taken by specialists in the sociological, psychological, and somatic influences which play upon the individual? There exist in modern society sizeable collections of such material which have hitherto been accorded slight attention by students of social science. I refer to the case histories of those individuals who have been ill, and especially those who have been cared for in hospitals and sanitariums.[1]