IS THE KAISER SANE?

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2376, 4 February 1915, Page 8

IS THE KAISER SANE?

In the "Revuo de Psychotherapie" of Geneva, Dr. NeTpp, rice-president of the Swiss Academy of Medicine, and a wellknown specialist on nervous and mental disease, publishes a curious analysis of the physical' and mental characteristics of the two allied Emperors He considers these two potentates, who are politically and morally responsible for the catastrophes under which the world is suffering, to be medically scarcely answerable for their acta. The case of the. Emperor Francis Joseph is simple. With an extraordinarily robust physical constitution, he possesses a nervous and sensitive equipment below the average. His retreating lew forehead, small brain capacity, and thick skull are apparent signs of this inferiority. Ho seems never to have understood and hardly to have felt what; has been going on around him. The most fearful domestic tragedies and public dramas .have left him with an untroubled digestion and a mind free for ordinary occupations and amusements. After summing up a technical diagnosis of his case, Dr. Neipn predicts that the Emperor-King will probably vegetate for a few more years after tho inevitable dismemberment of the monarchy, and end his days in senile imbecility. The case of the Kaiser is more complicated. Here we have a nature exceptionally endowed with intellectual faculties enough to have made him a good officer or public servant if he had been born in private life. But his childhood and youth were passed; in the intoxication of the Prussian triumphs of 1866 and 1870, which turned his head, until Teutonic pride was cubed in his brain, at the same time that will power degenerated to such, a degree that it was not equal to restraining the abnormal growth of unbridled ambition. To do him justice, it must be allowed that that pathological condition of the , Kaiser s intelligence is probably due in a great measure to his state of physical health, arising from hereditary taints. Tho symptoms of congenital ailments are arm atrophied, swellings of the* joints, and ear trouble. The Kaiser suffers from agonising headaches and frequent insomnia. Dr. Neipp concludes that if Francis Joseph is a victim of want of will-power, tho Kaiser is a hyperacute slave to caprice, and liable to intermittent attacks of melancholy < madness, or" dangerous lunacy. Tho professor is of opinion that the Kaiser will either put an end to himself in battle or finish in an asylum.