Closing

Abstract

Psychiatric residents in a number of training centers are taking a significant part of their training together with residents in family practice. The certification examination in family practice has 50% or more of its questions on the field of psychiatry. More and more psychiatrists are signing up for continuing education courses in internal medicine and neurology, especially designed for psychiatrists. In the light of this trend we want to welcome these two books warm and readable in style, thorough and comprehensive in content, they bring a painstaking insight to the mysterious intricacy of the body-in-themindlmind-in-the-body that has challenged healers of all kinds since ancient times. The neurotransmittors and neuroregulators are proliferating like the multitude of particles inside the nucleus of the atom. The complexity of interaction among genetic predispositions, acquired constitutional predispositions, environmental factors and emotional conflicts and stress seem overwhelming to grasp especially with critical periods, from conception on, occurring at different times in the developmental thrust for different types of biological, biochemical or behavioral processes. Even one enzyme deficiency alone may be expressed in a variety of ways: eigh teen different genetically determined varieties of the deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase have been identified. Dr. Weiner, with exquisite sensitivity to the role of psychological and interpersonal factors in the varieties of human disease, carefully documents the different levels of certain and uncertain data that convincingly portray the seven diseases he attends to in his book hypertension, peptic ulcer, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis,