No small amount of the disrepute into which expert medical testimony has fallen is due precisely to a failure on the part of the legal profession to appreciate these truisms. To the legal mind the transition from mental well-being to mental disease is exemplified by that wholly artificial, and to the psychiatrist's mind, subsidiary question of legal certification. The law takes no cognizance of the conditions necessitating this change; it only concerns itself with the delimiting frontier, viz.:--certification. Legally, the insane has become such through the filling out and signing of certain papers and through having submitted himself to a certain prescribed legal procedure. The physician, on the other hand, because of his peculiar relationship to the patient, and as a result of his particular training, looks upon this legal procedure as a necessary evil and merely as typifying the conventional mode by which society settles its accounts with its diseased members. Our legal brethren fail to appreciate, furthermore, the fact that an individual may be very seriously ill mentally and urgently require hospital treatment, without, however, showing those gross disorders of conduct which go to make up the legal evidence and diagnosis of insanity. Neither do they seem to recognize the possibility of a seriously unbalanced individual making quite a normal impression, at any rate before a jury of laymen at the time of his appearance in Court. Nowhere in psychiatry is this so apt to be the case as in that form of mental disease known as paranoia, where we are dealing with a diseased personality which in many respects still approaches and resembles normal man. The paranoiac, while he may harbor the most intricate and well-organized system of delusions, still remains approachable to us, and intellectually may be not only on a par with the average normal individual, but not infrequently gives the impression of being his superior. Nevertheless, this usually well-endowed human being at a certain point in his career goes off at a tangent and spends the rest of his life in the pursuit of a phantom. The paranoiac, starting out with vague, ill-defined ideas, succeeds in elaborating, step by step, a well-organized system of thought, of ideas which finally assume an all importance in the conduct of his life and remain unshakable.