The Therapy of the Word in Classical Antiquity: By Pedro Laín Entralgo. Translated by L. J. Rather and John M. Sharp. New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press. 1970. Pp. xxii + 253.

This book has been a pleasure to read. It has important things to say to several kinds of professionals, specialists (like the author) in the history of medicine, especially of Greek medicine, students of Greek literature and of the history of ideas, doctors who wish to view the relationship between doctor and patient as it was in the beginning, came to be as it is, and could one day become, for psychotherapists of all kinds (including psychoanalysts), theoreticians of dynamic psychology, and educators. The danger is that because it is written by a fine scholar, who 'plunges the reader into ancient Greek culture' and uses Greek words (albeit in Roman type and explained in the text), it may be neglected by many who could profit from it, find it stimulating to their own thinking, and enjoy its insights. So the aims of this review are to urge the book upon all who can enjoy Greek culture and to extract the gist of it for others.

Laín Entralgo has been struck, as have many before him, by the divorce between physical treatment and treatment by talk, by words, by speech (whether we call it psychotherapy, logotherapy, or analysis) and he has inquired when this divorce really began, when Western medicine gained 'its strongly somatic orientation' and 'denied the power of the word in the treatment of human illness', putting 'its faith in treatment by diet, drugs, and surgery' (Professor Rather in the preface). He has gone back to the start of medicine in the Western world and noted the explicit relationship between doctor and patient, especially any reference to speech between them. From Homer onwards he traces ideas about the nature of illness, its causes, and its treatment by therapeutic purification, by magical charm, by prayer, and by cheering speech uttered by persons of authority. He sharply distinguishes the magical charm from the therapeutic words.

In Chapter 2 Dr Entralgo takes us to just short of Plato, describing the culture of Archaic Greece (he follows Profes