The Social Significance of Mental Disease

In choosing a subject, I have decided on "The Social Significance of Mental Disease," because I believe that a discussion of mental disease from the point of view of its social significance not only will appeal to a larger audience than almost any other aspect of psychiatry, but will, I feel, be in harmony with Dr. Kober's purposes in founding these lectures, and because the illumination of the social aspects of psychiatry has been perhaps more distinctly American in origin than any other aspect of this medical specialty. In my lecture I will undertake not only to set forth the more outstanding facts bearing on the social importance of mental disease, but to correct, I hope, some serious misapprehensions regarding it; to proceed to the illumination of certain additional problems which are in line with tendencies in medicine and in biology generally that are just now coming to the front,