This book comes to the reviewer's desk only shortly after the writer has passed away. Georg Walther Groddeck, who died last year, was one of the extraordinary characters of medicine. He was a general practitioner in Baden-Baden who for many years had specialized in chronic diseases. He took those patients who had been through the hands of many other physicians and who finally were given up on the theory that nothing more could be done for them, and it was with this group of patients that he had his great successes. It seems fairly obvious that he could not expect to succeed with such problems by the ordinary technical procedures of modern medicine, which had already failed in each instance, and so he came to a study of his patients which involved not only an understanding of them from the psychological