He urges the desirability of the establishment of special wards in connection with general hospitals, pointing out that a mental case coming from such a ward would not thereby be stigmatised as insane. He quotes from ‘an American writer on psychiatry’:—“Fortunate would be the community in which there was a fully equipped and well-organised psychiatrical clinic under the control of a university and dedicated to the solution of such problems. The mere existence of such an institution would indicate that people were as much interested in endeavouring to increase the public sanity as they are in the results of exploration in the uttermost parts of the earth, or in the discovery of a new star.”[91] The Medico-Psychological Association’s report says:— “The lunacy law does not permit of the establishment of clinics on the lines which have been recommended, nor does it provide for the admission of uncertified cases to the public asylums. This, for the present at any rate, renders nugatory the suggested schemes for affording treatment for incipient and non-confirmed cases of mental disorder, and with that, to a large extent, fail the opportunities for study on which stress has been laid for adding to the knowledge and increasing the efficiency of asylum medical officers.” (p. 10.) Such weighty opinions as these serve to emphasise a further factor in the urgently needed reform—the necessity for a thorough overhauling of the law of lunacy, so that, while guarding the liberty of the subject, every obstacle should be removed that obstructs patients threatened with the dire calamity of insanity from securing preventive treatment at the earliest possible moment. In the _Lancet_ of August 5th, 1916, Dr. L. A. Weatherley writes:— “The great fact that must be continually brought forward in all these discussions is that, according to the reports of the Commissioners in Lunacy, the _recovery-rate of mental diseases is to-day no higher than it was in the ‘seventies’ of last century_. The ever-increasing difficulty in getting mental cases with small means quickly under skilled care must, I feel sure, account to a great extent for this lamentable fact.” “Marking time” since the seventies of the last century—how does this condition compare with that of most of the other branches of medical science? Heart disease, diphtheria, tuberculosis, tetanus, sepsis of all kinds, all these troubles and many others have shown unmistakable signs of yielding to the incessant and many-sided assaults of medical research. And, of insanity, all we have to report in this country is “little or no progress for fifty years.” Verily we have buried our talent deep in the ground. Finally, we may quote from an article the opening sentences of which might have been written yesterday, yet it was published in 1849! It was the fourth report of the visiting committee of Hanwell Asylum. The committee say:—