ABSTRACT
To combat the easy over-emphasis on physical appetites religious leaders have perhaps counter-emphasized the separability and independence of the spiritual aspects of personality. The view that physical diseases tend to be tied up with characteristic personality patterns has been accepted in principle by medical men ever since Claudius Galen and Hippocrates spoke of the spes phthisica—the tendency to a tense, unrealistic cheerfulness in lung tuberculosis. This particular pattern is somewhat doubted, but others have been better substantiated. All physical diseases, by the frustrations of living they produce, tend to issue, secondarily, in personality changes. Attempts to correlate body factors with temperament show that the general breadth component is tied up with cyclothyme as opposed to schizothyme traits, which is in agreement with E. Kretschmer’s labelling both athletic and asthenic build ‘leptosome’ and observing that it is leptosomatic trends which are most associated with schizophrenia.
