Sir,

Your reviewer of Mr. F. Matthias Alexander's book, The Use of the Self, ends by saying "The book will be found helpful and suggestive to both the medical practitioner and the educationist," but gives no indication of what kind of help may be had from reading it, so as to encourage others to study it. I can understand his diffidence because, until he has experimented on himself as Alexander did or experienced the changes in himself that result from a course of lessons from Alexander, he could not realize the changes that take place in the functioning of his various organs as the result of the new use induced and consequently the help that the practice of the new use of the self always brings. I have discussed this subject with many medical men, and I find that, like your reviewer, they can describe generally the contents of the book, but that they say they do not know exactly what it means, and have no standard from which to criticize it. They seem to think that each person's "use" is inborn and natural, and therefore correct for that person, so why disturb it and make him conscious of his "use" and become a potential hypochondriac? It is the one way to cure a hypochondriac. But, putting on one side all those so-called healthy persons with their inborn natural use, what about all the sick and diseased persons who once were healthy with inborn natural use? Why did not this "use" keep them healthy in body and mind, instead of filling our hospital out-patient departments with incurables (according to Dr. Colin Mackenzie) and producing the chronic cases in general practice, both of which bring the whole subject of present-day diagnosis-treatment, and medical training into question?

Mr. Alexander is not a medical man ­ in fact, he has not a degree to his name ­ but he has given in his books the results of years of observation in dealing with badly co-ordinated human beings and his considered conclusions therefrom, and offers them to the medical profession as his contribution towards the problems that have defied the best brains in the profession and out of it since the world began. In this connexion I would like to quote from a leader on "Research in medicine" in the Times of December 29th, 1927.

"Experience amply shows that progress in knowledge may be achieved by any one of those who are seeking the truth, and that every worker possesses a chance of great achievement. . . . All true scientific work is deserving of encouragement since all true scientific work is endowed with potentiality of service on the greatest scale. . . . Men of science no less than laymen have need to take this truth to heart. In the study of nature there is neither academic nor extra-mural, orthodox nor unorthodox. It is a curious fact that the greatest discoveries in medicine have proceeded from services lying outside the schools, but it is not the less true that the work of the schools has usually been essential to the development of every new idea."

Alexander has given the schools an idea; it is for them to develop it.

I am, etc.,
A. Murdoch
Bexhill, May 20th.