Physician and Patient. Personal Care. Edited by L. Eugene Emerson. Published by  Harvard University Press, Cambridge. 1929.

This little volume of 244 pages is intended for the practitioner in medicine, but may be read with interest by all who have to do with the sick patient: nurses, social workers, or anyone who has ever been sick or had anything to do with the sick.

The purpose of this work is to set the official seal of approval on the idea that the patient is a person with an individual personality. To quote from the introduction by the author: “Another reason that makes these lectures peculiarly timely is this: with the wider scientific study, especially through psychology of diseases and patients, it has been found that a large number of cases apparently organic are really functional. This means that the only way of successfully treating them is through psychotherapy. Furthermore, if successful treatment is difficult, or impossible, the only way of even partially understanding such cases is through human sympathy and psychological analysis of the personality of the patients. This necessarily involves not only the care of the patient but also caring for the patient.”

The following subjects are dealt with: Some of the Human Relations of Doctor and Patient; The Care of Patients; Its Psychological Aspects; The Medical Education of Jones, by Smith; The Significance of Illness; Some Psychological Observations by the Surgeon; Human Nature and Its Reaction to Suffering; The Care of the Aged; The Care of the Dying; Attention to Personality in Sex Hygiene.

The philosophy and insight of the editor into the interrelation of the somatic and the psychic approach to the patient gives this book a place in the physician's library. To successfully treat ill persons, it is necessary to keep in mind the unity of the organism, for the art of healing needs to heal the whole man and not a selected portion of his general makeup. Recent attention to the psychological orientation in the problems of life and disease reveal that the true understanding of such cases is brought about through human sympathy, and a