The characteristic defect of American medicine is possibly the tendency to lay emphasis on the disease, the lesion and the laboratory test and to overlook "the patient as a whole." Accordingly, this book, which seeks to explain the European concept of the human constitution in the light of American medical thought, is both stimulating and unique.
The author writes in a fluent, almost colloquial, style. A purist, it is true, may object to such terms as "sexotropic" and "sicklemia" and must certainly object to the term "oculist" when applied to a physician who is called on to explain the cause of iridocyclitis. But these slips may be forgiven any former Viennese professor who spares the reader the ordeal of reading English words in a German sentence structure.
The constitution, as Dr. Bauer defines it, is the hereditary makeup of the individual as determined by his genes. This logical definition is