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This book is clearly addressed to what is now called the primary care physician, a euphemism for what used to be the family doctor, an anachronism in our politicized culture. This is the medical practitioner who is eulogized because he is a dying breed, acclaimed as the backbone of medicine because he manages the job no one else wants and satirized as incompetent because he does general practice.
Dr. Jarvic, the editor, who is also a contributor to the text, is unique in being professor of both psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine; there are two other contributors who also have professorial rank at the medical schools where they do their teaching. Louis Jolyon West, M.D., chairman of the psychiatric department at U.C.L.A., wrote the foreward. He certainly needs no introduction to members of our profession or to those who read The New York Times or lesser newspapers covering sensational stories.
The book is divided into five parts, the first being an overview of the field, and the last being an even briefer section entitled “concluding remarks.” Approximately 100 pages are assigned to “experimental psychopharmacology: drugs as tools,” a subject of interest to those who are research oriented. More than 200 pages are devoted to “clinical psychopharmacology: rationale of drug treatment in psychiatry,” and half of these deal with affective disorders. Part IV deals with “drugs of dependence,” a topic much discussed but of decidedly limited appeal to those who fancy themselves especially adept in the practice of psychoanalysis and its alleged spinoff, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy.
In reviewing the modern history of psychopharmacology there is a listing of the major events starting with the publication of Sir Humphrey Davy's monograph on nitrous oxide in 1800. Havelock Ellis introduced his mescaline experiences into the literature in 1898. LSD was synthesized in 1938. Its psychotomimetic properties were not