This is a valuable book, because its matter and its approach should form part of every medical education, an omission which is still far too common. It is the first offering from a project of medical-social collaboration in New York. It reviews the whole field of health and illness and its relation to social structure, and later volumes will take up specific subjects. There is a particularly interesting chapter on hospital practice, something often taken for granted, quite uncritically.

To the psycho-analytic reader its particular thesis of the importance of the social setting in the genesis of illness or as a determinant of the particular response of the patient will not be new, and is already part of his stock-in-trade. In fact it can be said that the authors do not go far enough, for they do not consider sufficiently the unconscious relationships at work in all human contacts and in personality development.