PSYCHOSOMATIC PRINCIPLES.

There are four lines of development that might be called psychosomatic principles. The first represents the work initiated by Claude Bernard, Cannon, and others, in neurophysiology and endocrinology in relationship to stress. The second is the application of psychoanalytic formulations to the understanding of illness. The third is in the development of the social sciences, particularly anthropology, social psychology and sociology with respect to the emotional life of man, and, fourth, there is an increased application of epidemiological techniques to the understanding and incidence of disease and its causes. These principles can be applied to the concepts of comprehensive medicine and they bid fair to be unifying and helpful in its study. This means that future practitioners, as well as those working in the field of psychosomatic medicine, are going to have to have a much more precise knowledge of the influence of emotions on bodily processes.