is not our purpose to review the literature at this time, but an illustrative quotation from an extensive study of 437 premature or immature children will not be amiss.The fate of immature children is not enviable ; almost one-half of them die during the first year of life. Of those that remain alive, the majority are physically as well as mentally underdeveloped. Some of them show a late mental development; others show a condition of psychic infantilism, if the term may be used in its nonspecific sense; while still others show permanent and severe mental diseases. When they are passed in review, one is surprised at the variety and amount of abnormality encountered, almost a regular "pathologic museum." In brief, the immature infant becomes the backward school child, and is a potential psychopathic or neuropathic patient and even a potential candidate for the home for imbeciles and idiots.1In contrast with this statement is the conclusion that physical and mental injuries resulting from prematurity, which remain through life, are not observed, that such divergences as delay in walking are due to lack of muscular tone rather than to mental injury, and that the men¬ tality of the children observed was of the "highest type in every par-
During recent years numerous studies of the abnormal have centered about the relationship of bodily habitus to mental disturbance. A number of investigators, including Kretschmer, 1 have undertaken to show that a marked correspondence does exist between the various forms of physical build and mental disturbance. Kretschmer specifically contends that the 'pyknic' habitus is characteristically associated with the manic-depressive psychosis, while the ' athletic' and the ' asthenic' varieties of habitus are clearly associated with the schizophrenic forms of insanity. Not only does a correspondence of physical build and psychic structure hold true in the field of the abnormal but a similar correspondence may also be determined-as he thinks-among normal individuals.Kretschmer's studies have led him to believe that at least two 'temperamental types' may be determined among the normal population and that these two types are related in character to the two major groups of insanity. While the manic-depressive insanity is typically characterized by a cyclic variation in mood, so that the patient may pass from a state of extreme depression to one of maniacal excitation, among the normal there are many individuals who show this same tendency, albeit the fluctuations remain within much narrower limits. These individuals Kretschmer considers as of the cyclothymic disposition or temperament. In contrast is that large group who evince in minor degree the characteristics that under pathological conditions become the symptoms of the schizophrenic disorders. The well-developed symptoms of schizophrenia, such as emotional blunting, disorders of attention and disturbance in the associative 1 E. Kretschmer, Physique and character (Eng. trans, from 2nd German ed. by W.
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