You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a pleasure to predict that this paper will some day be recognized as inaugurating a new era in psychosomatic research. The work which it describes is in the great tradition of William Beaumont's studies of Alexis St. Martin and of Walter Cannon's fundamental researches on bodily changes in acute emotional states. Nor is it an accident that the stomach is once again the subject of a basic investigation of psychosomatic interrelationships.
The obvious fact that human beings vary is a lesson which we tend to forget both in physiology and in psychoanalysis. Wolf and Wolff observed that emotional stresses caused increased secretion in a male patient with a gastrostomy. A second group of workers noted that the same type of emotional stress caused decreased secretion in a female patient, and jumped prematurely to the conclusion that this might account for the higher incidence of duodenal ulcers in males. Margolin and his co-workers find that the same patient can on certain occasions react with increased secretion and on other occasions with decreased secretion, a variability not only among individuals but also in the same