The Pathogenesis of Anaërobic Microbic Infections in the Major and Minor Psychoses, with Control Cases

Abstract

The subject of this thesis is the outcome of what might be termed a hereditary interest in the complex problem of the relationship of chronic infections to the psychoses and allied mental disorders. Circumstances enabled me, while still a student, to undertake very humbly the continuation of my father's researches in the Scottish Asylums' Laboratory at a point where his illness and death might have proved the closing of a long and arduous chapter. That this would have been so is, as far as I know, borne out by the fact that up to the present no work directly bearing on his later bacteriological studies has been published. The researches I have undertaken during the past six years have been an attempt to elucidate more clearly what exactly are the bacteriological factors at work, and, further, in what manner they attack the economy generally, and with what result. In my endeavour to verify and extend Ford-Robertson's views I have been singularly fortunate.