For the relief of the mentally afflicted amongst us, and especially for the prevention of insanity, it is our bounden duty as a nation to take measures such as most civilised countries have adopted some time ago. For this purpose it is necessary that there should be hospitals to which patients in the early stages of mental disturbance can go, without any legal formalities, and receive proper treatment from physicians competent to diagnose their troubles and to give them appropriate advice. It is important that such special hospitals should be attached to general hospitals, so that sensitive patients may not be deterred from resorting to them by the fear of the stigma which in this country, unfortunately, is so inseparably linked with the idea of a “lunatic asylum.” It is also important that such institutions should be affiliated to medical schools, not merely to ensure the adequate education of the coming generations of medical practitioners, but also to afford the staffs of such hospitals the proper opportunities for carrying on the work of investigation which is essential for the success of the scheme we have sketched out. No less important and urgent a reform than the foregoing, however, is another consideration—the _legal_ aspect of the treatment of the mentally deranged. The glaring defects of the present system have been well and briefly pointed out by Dr. Bedford Pierce in his article from which we have quoted, published in the _British Medical Journal_ of January 8th, 1916. Again, Sir George Savage, writing in Allbutt’s _System of Medicine_ (Vol. VIII, p. 429) states:— “The lunacy legislation of this country, despite the Acts of 1890 and 1891, remains in an unsettled state; and the care and treatment of the insane are burdened with vexations and unnecessary restrictions. Not only are the steps required for the placing of a person of unsound mind under legal care complicated and clumsy, but they result in many cases in a delay of that early treatment which is so important in cases of mental disease.” Dr. F. W. Mott writes:— “There is yet one point which it is desirable to mention, as the result of both hospital and asylum experience, and that is the necessity of some earnest attempt being made to establish a means of intercepting, for hospital treatment, such cases of incipient and acute insanity as are not yet certifiable. It is probable that many would not come into the asylums, and a certain number of cases thus come under observation willingly, and in time to retard the progress of the disease. Practitioners could send doubtful cases for observation and treatment to such hospitals, where, moreover, the opportunity would be afforded of improving their own knowledge as to the early signs of insanity.”[90]