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This book will add nothing to the knowledge or insight of the practising psychoanalyst, though it might serve to help him brush up on those elementary physiological processes which in his mind have long since fused into the delightfully simple concept of 'somatic compliance' (a companion piece to the general practitioner's concept of 'nerves'). The medical man, however, will find in this volume a concisely systematized, interesting and thoroughly plausible account of just how psychic disturbances bring about those changes in the functioning of the body which may and do result in the illnesses which some of his best friends have. For him the book brings together and coördinates what has at best been a fragmentary education in the psychosomatic aspects of medicine gained from occasional articles in isolated periodicals and a good deal of backstairs gossip. A bunch of ugly rumors are at last confirmed, and at the same time rendered a little less ugly.
After a preliminary chapter devoted to a general study of emotion in which the reader's fears are very skilfully calmed as he is told that emotions are here to stay, the author turns the spotlight in turn upon the gastro-intestinal system, respiration, the cardiovascular system and finally the endocrines. Throughout, the emphasis is strictly upon emotion in the gross rather than upon any subtleties, although the pickings were apparently very nice from the adequate range of case histories cited. There is thus no mention, for instance, of the findings of Alexander and his collaborators (This QUARTERLY, III, 1934) in the author's discussion of alimentary disorders. Unquestionably it is better so, however,