Notes

THE JOSIAH MACY, JR. FOUNDATION has issued a Six Year Review 1930–1936. In the definition of its program it is stated: 'The patient as an individual has always been the focus of the arts of healing. At times the clarity of this conception has been obscured by the very technical progress in medicine, as notably during the last fifty years when the bewildering array of new data and new methods of diagnosis, new materials and devices for treatment issued from the highly specialized research in pathology, bacteriology, biochemistry and radiology. These additions to medical knowledge and equipment have resulted in brilliant successes in somatic medicine and in surgery; but inevitably they have shifted the attention of the physician more and more from the patient as an individual to the disease as an entity, or to some particular organ or tissue as the seat of the disease. No doubt further advances will be achieved through the somatic approach, especially since investigators are now giving more attention to systemic factors, to chemical interrelationships among organs and organ systems, involving hormones, vitamins and other chemical agents, and to the recently discovered bioelectric phenomena of somatic processes. Thus medicine is coming more clearly to recognize the individual, with his inherited and unique development and responses as a somatic unity. At the same time medicine is realizing that this purely somatic approach is incomplete and especially inadequate in the diagnosis and therapy of the more highly differentiated functions.' In the Report of Activities it is gratifying to learn to what extent the Foundation has given its support to the study of psychosomatic problems: 'Pavlov's conditioned reflex, the experimental attitude and method in psychological research, the integrating principle of the Gestalt theory, Cannon's "homeostasis", the ablation experiments revealing the neural basis for emotional expression, recent discoveries of elaborate structura