First published in 1948, Mental Abnormality: Facts and Theories was written when great changes were taking place in the handling of mental disorders and in the teaching of the subject in medical schools. Knowledge of this progress reached the public in a scrappy and sometimes misleading form, and the author felt that people had as much right to know about it as about advances in the more physical side of medicine. This book gives an outline of the many and often unsuspected ways in which so called ‘mental abnormality’ could manifest itself, together with an account of developments both in theory and treatment at the time. Today it can be read in its historical context.

This book is a re-issue originally published in 1948. The language used and views portrayed are a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

Millais Culpin (1874–1952) was an English surgeon, psychologist and entomologist. He graduated as Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1905, becoming a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1907. He was one of the first doctors to suggest that ‘shell shock’ was an emotional disturbance, rather than something caused by a physical trauma, and in 1917 he became a neurological specialist to the Army.