This book is about a remarkable man and the elegant and revealing experiments conducted on him. Written by Stewart Wolf and Harold Wolff, two dedicated pioneers of psychosomatic medicine, it encompasses the life history of Tom Little, a man of 57 years, who had a gastric fistula. Tom was one of several patients with a gastrostomy who became experimental subjects. The first such experiments had been reported by William Beaumont in 1833, on Alexis St Martin, a Canadian voyageur with an unusually dramatic life. Tom was not like this. As noted by the famed physiologist Walter Cannon, who wrote this book’s introduction, he was sensitive, proud, and independent and thus an ideal subject for psychosomatic studies.

When Little was 9 years old he had …