Half the people who call on doctors are sick in mind as well as in body. To describe their trouble, doctors now use the word psychosomatic (from the Greek psyche, mind, and soma, body). Last week a top-rank woman practitioner of psychosomatic medicine, Dr. Flanders Dunbar of Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, published a fascinating book on the subject (Mind and Body; Random House; $3.50).
Psychosomatic patients do not just imagine their ailments, Dr. Dunbar points out; they may be seriously or fatally ill of real diseases. An upset mind, she says, can actually bring on or aggravate heart...
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