Patients have Families: By Henry B. Richardson, M.D. New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1945. 408 pp.

With the growth of the psychosomatic movement, interest in the relationship between disease and personality increases, yet emphasis is probably still focused too much on the individual while tending to exclude his emotional and physical environment. Too often overlooked is the fact that the many complex factors in day to day living which mold and influence the individual personality likewise contribute to the medical picture. Richardson finds in the unit of the family the lowest common denominator for the inclusive picture necessary to understand fully the relationship between disease and personality. A patient's family is 'the unit of illness, because it is the unit of living'; and illness in an individual relates to the total group as the symptom relates to the disease. In the family are the roots of the emotional as well as the socioeconomic and cultural patterns; in it are the antecedents of the psychological factors pertinent to illness. Richardson bases his book on a concept of 'family equilibrium' in which the individual members, like organs of the body, maintain a state of balance. Illness can disrupt