After caring for an insane patient for a time at home, the question arises as to the desirability of sending him away to a sanitarium. Generally this is a wise course to pursue. The constant association with an insane person is undermining; the responsibility is often too heavy; children, often inheriting the same neurotic tendency and always impressionable, should not be exposed to the perverting influence; it may not be safe to keep a patient with suicidal or homicidal impulses in his home; the surroundings amid which the insane ideas first started may tend to continue a suggestion of these ideas. Removal to strange locality and new scenes, the influence of strangers, the abandonment of all responsibilities and duties, and the atmosphere of obedience, routine, and discipline are all beneficial. An insane person will generally make a greater effort for a stranger than for a familiar relative. Discipline, in the form of orders of the physicians, and exact obedience is very often very salutary. There is a feeling with some that all discipline is cruel. This is not so, for the conduct of an insane person is not all insane, but frequently needs correction. Many cases of mental alienation improve promptly under custodial care, many need it all their lives. A great many cases of insanity are never obliged to go away from home, and there is a considerable number who carry on a business while still insane, rear a family, and take care of themselves. In general, a depressed patient should be kept at home as long as there is absolute safety in so doing. Most other forms of mental disease progress more rapidly toward recovery in sanitariums or hospitals equipped for such patients. Prospects of recovery are never jeopardized by confinement in a proper institution. Mental and physical rest, quiet, regularity of eating, exercising, and sleeping are the essentials which underlie all successful treatment of these cases. Dietetics, diversion by means of games, music, etc., regular occupation of any practicable sort, together with the association with the hopeful, tactful, and reasoning minds of physicians and nurses trained for this purpose are of great value. It must be remembered that in wholly civilized localities madhouses have been replaced by hospitals, keepers have been replaced by nurses and attendants, and the old methods of punishment and coercion have been long since abandoned, in the light of modern compassionate custody. Certain forms of insanity are hopeless from the start. Few recover after two years of mental aberration. Omitting the hopeless cases, over forty per cent of the cases of insanity recover. About sixty per cent recover of the cases classed as melancholia and mania. Most recoveries occur during the first year of the disease; but depressed patients may emerge and recover after several years' treatment. FOOTNOTES: [10] Caution. Dangerous. Use only on physician's order. APPENDIX =Patent Medicines=[11]