The question whether involutional melancholia in females can be regarded as distinct form of mental illness representing a reaction to bodily changes following the menopause has been amply discussed. It has been held by some that such a melancholia is no more than one phase of the manic-depressive psychosis (1, 2). Others hold the opposite view and justify it on statistical and clinical grounds (3).

Schizophrenia may conservatively be listed among the greatest scourges of present-day society, yet the average citizen has scarcely heard of it.

“The etiology … is unsettled; its pathology unknown and its clinical limits in dispute and yet it is a more serious problem than either tuberculosis or cancer. There are twice as many hospital cases of schizophrenia as of tuberculosis. Each year not less than 30,000 to 40,000 individuals, soon after adolescence or in the first flush of manhood or womanhood, fall victims to this condition. Annually 75,000 new patients are admitted to state hospitals and at least one fourth are schizophrenics…. They are condemned to a veritable living death, devoid of emotional life as others savour it and barred from participation in the normal activities and affairs of living” (1).

While a vast literature refers to anomalies in various arteries of the brain, there are only a few reports concerning anatomical changes of vessels following altered circulatory conditions. Critchley mentions in his study of the anterior cerebral artery and its syndromes, an observation in which an arterio-sclerotic anterior cerebral artery of one side was so small as to be incapable of maintaining an adequate circulation, so that by way of an abnormally large anterior communicating artery the opposite anterior cerebral supplied both hemispheres. Critchley adds to that case several similar observations from the literature. The application of arteriography to circulatory disturbances has directed attention to analogous cases. Thus Moniz reported several observations in which a closure of the carotid artery of one side led to a distension of the anterior communicating in order to establish collateral circulation. The same mechanism appeared to be effective in the following two cases which we met in the course of our studies on brain vessels.