Handbook of Stress, Medicine and Health

Ed Cary L Cooper CRC Press, £69, pp 388 ISBN 0 849 32908 6

Medicine has yet to decide its role in understanding and treating stress related disorders. There is a huge and increasing public interest in the part played by stress in illness, and a firm general belief that this role is a considerable one. Medical science–preoccupied with such contemporary excitements as molecular biology, transplants, and imaging technology–seems reluctant to listen to the clamour at its door.

Only psychiatry has accepted–not always unanimously–that stress can be important in the genesis of illness, and that understanding more about stress could open new avenues of treatment. Some serious proselytising is …