Thomas W. Salmon, Psychiatrist

Dr. Earl Bond has earned the gratitude of a large number of readers on both sides of the Atlantic by producing this biography of Dr. Salmon. It is an unusually good book, as readable as a novel, dealing with well-selected material and in a very realistic xvay. It is perhaps natural that Dr. Bond should regard his task almost as the writing of a case history, and that makes it more interesting because ?ne realizes the true humanity and fallibility of this near-genius. Dr. Salmon is shown to us here as someone whose tremendous drive for better conditions for the mentally sick and for mental hygiene had their ?rigins in some of the early emotional frustrations of his life. We learn how from his early days in the United States Public Health Service he was imbued with the spirit of a reformer and with an emotional interest focused in the main on matters psychiatric. Most of us who knew him, or knew about him, realized the close working relationship that there had been between him and Clifford Beers, but this book presents us with many other fascinating Pictures of his work, the campaign for the improvement of conditions on Ellis Island, the starting of the mental hygiene movement and the influence towards mental hygiene concepts which he exercised ?n the Rockefeller Foundation. These are the "'ghlights of the story up to the war. During the first World War, Salmon not merely Planned the psychiatric provisions for the U.S. pfntyj but served throughout their campaign in ranee as the senior psychiatric consultant and a^ministrator in the field, and had a major share ?*ter the war in writing the massive Volume X of the U-S. Medical History of the War, which was of such value to us in this country in 1939. To ajj whG were jn psychiatry in the Services uring the recent war, the extracts from Salmon's e*ters and the general story that Dr. Bond tells us ? nis war experience in Washington and in France