The Road to Nosologic Nirvana

To the Editor.—  I have inadvertently discovered that reading the Archives can transport the reader back in time. There I was, perusing Silverstein and Harrow's March 1981 article "Schneiderian First-Rank Symptoms in Schizophrenia" (1981;38:288-293) and I found myself reading that diagnosis was not performed blindly and that the authors used DSM-II criteria. As the reputation for high standards of the Archives is beyond reproach and the authors are well known, the only logical conclusion was that DSM-III criteria, Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC), and Feighner criteria had not yet been developed, that the unreliable and operationally ill-defined DSM-II criteria were the only ones available, and that I must have been transported back to 1971 or earlier. Fortunately, the honking of a Model-T beneath my window reversed the time warp in which I found myself and I am now back in the 1980s, when reliable and operationally defined diagnostic criteria are the