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The New York Academy of Medicine's Committee on Medicine and the Changing Order has published a general report, reviewed above, and a series of monographs on the specific problems of medicine and its related fields. In addition, it now presents a series of essays on some aspects of its material in a brief volume entitled Medical Addenda.
The present volume maintains the high level of its predecessors, and offers a series of essays of interest to readers of this QUARTERLY.
Dr. James A. Miller contributes a brief essay on The Doctor Himself, which is rather superficial in tone but essentially is an emphatic statement of the rôle of the personality of the physician in medical practice.
The late Dr. Louis Hamman, in a chapter on Psychosomatic Medicine, presents the point of view of an open-minded internist making a serious attempt to include psychologic understanding in his diagnostic and therapeutic work. His essay represents the degree to which one can expect psychodynamic material to be accepted by a large group of contemporary internists who are impressed by the current psychosomatic emphasis but are given no opportunity for additional training. He is able to include general social and emotional factors in his diagnostic thinking, is able to avoid mistakes based on an overemphasis on somatic factors, places the person rather than the disease in the center of his thinking, speaks hopefully of a limited psychotherapy in the hands of the general physician, and again emphasizes the value of the understanding