This volume is addressed to medical students. Its purpose is to persuade the student to think of disease processes as arising out of the whole physiological and psychological life of a human being. In keeping with this purpose it presents a general philosophical point of view, a chapter on history-taking or 'clinical biography', a discussion of genetics, heredity and growth, a review of certain aspects of morphological typology, a discussion of constitutional physiology with some clinical applications, and finally again, a philosophical conclusion.

Such an outline, adequately developed, would include almost all of scientific medicine. It is therefore not surprising that these various subjects receive uneven consideration. Morphology receives some seventy pages; heredity, forty; physiology, thirty. This, of course, is a measure neither of their relative importance,