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The psychoanalyst with leisure who still has some libido left for reading about the development of medicine outside his own field will read the seventeenth of the annual series of Lectures to the Laity with delight and benefit. The New York Academy of Medicine
and Iago Galdston, Editor of the Lectures, can be proud again of this outstanding volume.
The first essay is contributed by Sir James Spence who deals with Disease and Its Local Setting. The essay, of great charm, sincerity and maturity, was written shortly before the scientist's death. It is followed by a paper by Ralph Gerard who discusses ethics as rooted in biology. He concludes: 'Science has given us a Utopia of means; it may yet give us a Utopia of ends. And the religious spirit must urge men toward it.' Howard S. Liddell demonstrates, in his Natural History of Neurotic Behavior, the relation of deprivation, conflict, and frustration. The topic is continued by Theodore H. Ingalls who discusses recent advances in our knowledge about Environment in Heredity. It is surprising how much environment can deflect the realization of hereditary potentials. From there, Milton J. E. Senn summarizes the Changing Concepts of Child Care. The series is rounded off with Dr. Russell M. Wilder's highly informative remarks about Nutrition.
All together, the lectures are authoritative in quality, informative in substance, provocative and inspiring in effect. Reading them increases once again the scientist's longing for a life of eight hundred years of which he would spend seven hundred and eighty in training and the remaining twenty in contemplative retirement. Any other solution would be a poor compromise in the face of all the knowledge which the lectures to the laity hold out for us.