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In a preliminary note announcing this title as a department of THE QUARTERLY,1 attention was called to the magnitude of the problem created by psychosomatic illness in present day morbidity and incapacity as well as in mortality.
Dr. Weiss2 writes:
There is little need to emphasize the importance of hypertension. According to the statistics of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company3 every other individual in the United States past the age of fifty years dies of cardiovascular-renal disease. From other sources4 we have evidence that probably half of these deaths are due to "essential" hypertension, that is, that almost one-quarter of all people past the age of fifty years die of the effects of hypertension on one or another of the vital organs. Thus essential hypertension becomes the greatest problem of middle adult life, not even excepting cancer.5
America is rapidly becoming populated by people of advancing years. For example in 1900 it was estimated that twenty per cent of the population fell in the age group forty to sixty, while in 1950 it is estimated that thirty per cent of the population will fall into this age group. This is the period when hypertension is most likely to manifest itself and to become the most important factor in the development of heart, blood vessel and kidney disease.
Since so much chronic disabling disease is found in the