Practitioners understand the wholeness and unity of their patients. Instead of being considered isolated organ systems or enzyme cycles, patients are understood as coherent entities composed of coordinated and interrelated processes and systems. This fundamental understanding guides investigative and clinical care approaches in psychosomatic medicine. As an integrative science, psychosomatic re...

1Department of General Internal Medicine, Division of Psychosomatic Medicine, Inselspital, Bern University Hospital, 3010 Bern, Switzerland 2Institute of Medical Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics, University Medical Center of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Obere Zahlbacher Straße 69, 55131 Mainz, Germany 3Heart Failure and Transplantation, Department of Cardiology, Inselsp...

1 HE CONTRIBUTIONS made by behavioral scientists to psychosomatic medicine have been exhaustively reviewed. Alexander reports from the viewpoint of the dynamic psychiatrist, Mirsky from the position of the experimenter, Grinker from the standpoint of the clinical researcher, and Wittkower and Cleghorn discuss the sociopsychological concomitants of various disease entities. Historical and theore...

The scientific program included plenary lectures, scientific symposia, workshops, clinical courses, master classes and poster sessions. In total, 37 symposia were submitted of which 28 were accepted for the program. In addition, 7 free paper sessions were organized, which included many of the 113 free oral presentations that were submitted. Fifty of the free oral presentations were accepted as ...

Neuroscience was an integral part of psychosomatic medicine at its inception in the early 20th century. Since the mid-20th century, however, psychosomatic research has largely ignored the brain. The field of neuroscience has burgeoned in recent years largely because a variety of powerful new methods have become available. Many of these methods allow for the noninvasive study of the living human...

Whilst ethology has garnered the attention of historians of science, particularly those interested in the biological and behavioural sciences, historians of medicine have yet to explore ethology’s medical significance. Ethology, “the biological study of behaviour”, is historically associated with the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz, who, alongside Karl von Frisch, were awarded the ...