“These studies are the work of a clear, strong thinker, who is in deep sympathy with his subject.” David Phillips.
+ + Int. J. Ethics. 16: 498. Jl. ’06. 1000w.
“The writer’s method is a little diffuse, a little wanting in the power to grip a thought with a terse expression. For the high earnestness of the book there can be nothing but praise; but Mr. Lyttleton must be content to compress his material.”
+ – Lond. Times. 4: 439. D. 15, ’05. 490w.
M
Maartens, Maarten (Jozua Marius Willem Schwartz). Healers. †$1.50. Appleton.
The healing of mind and body is dealt with in this novel in which nearly every character stands for some variety of scientific or religious opinion. Chief among them are “Professor Baron Lisse, of Leyden, the great bacteriologist in religion a conforming Protestant skeptic; his wife, a poet, converted, in the course of the story, to Roman Catholicism; their son Edward, who from childhood has hated his father’s vivisection, and who wins fame as a follower of Charcot; Sir James Graye, an idiot on whose skull Edward operates, enabling him to regain sufficient reason to learn the wickedness of the world and escape from it by suicide ... Kenneth Graye, James’s devoted uncle and guardian, who—so far as we understand mental ailments—went mad because he believed madness to be hereditary in his family, and recovered his sanity, partly on receiving proof that it was not, completely on receiving proof that he had misjudged a tragic event in his own life.” (Lond. Times.)
“Is a striking, interesting book, not altogether satisfactory, but one that all should read.”