Review of Case studies in the psychopathology of crime

Abstract

Reviews the book, Case studies in the psychopathology of crime by Ben Karpman (1933). The reviewer notes that with over one thousand badly printed pages devoted to the case histories of five patients at the Department for the Criminal Insane (Howard Hall) at St. Elizabeth's Hospital--this surely is a stupendous work. Yet after reading every one of these pages one has the feeling that something is lacking. In the preface the author says: "In particular, as the present volume is addressed mainly to a public that has no direct interest in refined psychiatric diagnosis and intimate psychiatric discussions, such interpretations have in the main been omitted." To the reviewer this seems fallacious reasoning because it is just the non-psychiatric public who will need some interpretations to make the cases useful. Adverse criticism of this book must be based on the omissions. The material presented evidences a great amount of careful labor and will prove its usefulness in many ways. However, typographically the text is quite bad. It is questionable if either galley or page proofs were ever read--misspelling, crooked lines, and many such typographic errors are easily found. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)