Van Loon, having examined over 200 cases from among 1100 insane patients in Java, found the most common types of mental disease to be dementia praecox, general paresis, various manifestations of cerebral syphilis and acute maniacal or confusional states. Not only were all forms of mental disorder known in European countries represented, but their comparative frequency and the types of conduct exhibited were, on the whole, what might be expected in the study of a group of similar cases encountered in any other part of the world.

Overbeck-Wright in his book—“Lunacy in India”—notes that 44% of cases were under treatment for various types of mania, 15.9% for melancholia, 4.8% for delusional insanity, 5.2% for idiocy, 5.7% for dementia and 6.6% for insanity following the use of Cannabis indica. It is noted that dementia praecox is not included in the statistical returns, but the author states that in his experience hebephrenia and katatonia account for a much larger proportion of cases than melancholia.

Overbeck-Wright is of the opinion that general paresis is quite common in India notwithstanding the fact that for many years the opinion has obtained that syphilis of the central nervous system and the parasyphilitic diseases were exceedingly rare among tropical natives. He regards the incidence of cerebral disease in syphilitic natives as less than with Europeans, attributing this fact to the existence of an immunity acquired through the prevalence of syphilis among these people during a period of several centuries. Cases of general paresis are generally reported under the diagnosis of chronic mania.

Van Loon also notes the mistake made in most books on tropical medicine as to the rarity of general paresis. General paresis being a disease in which we have such characteristic laboratory diagnostic tests, especially the colloidal gold test, there should be little difficulty in settling this question of its absence or relative infrequency among natives of tropical regions.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.