ABSTRACT
To be historical about mind-body interaction, we must return to ancient concepts of medicine. When in India learning about traditional Hindu medicine, I was surprised to learn that Ayurveda, which is more than 2000 years old, encompassed concepts of natural and acquired immunity and of psychophysiological response specificity; it believed that certain types of people, based on personality and somatotype, had greater resistance to disease (1). Galen believed that melancholy women were more prone to cancer than sanguine women, and Osler apparently deemed it is as important to know what is going on in a man's head as in his chest to predict the outcome of pulmonary tuberculosis. Jonas Salk pointed out in the early 1960s that all disease really relates to genetic, behavioral, nervous, and immune interrelationships (and I think we should add endocrine) (2). We need to think of all disease in multifactoral ways. For example, in A. Mirsky's work, dependency and/ or stress measures were lower in patients with peptic ulcer who had high pepsinogen levels (3).
