ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how physicians' problems, stresses, and ways of coping with them seem to be pertinent to the situations of other physicians and patients, other scientists, and perhaps to any group of men confronted with life stress of magnitude. It suggests that implications which some of the findings of this study may have for the further development of conceptualized knowledge about interrelated social and psychological aspects of medicine, science, and human stress. The rapidity with which new diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and new drugs is also responsible for the fact that the practicing physician is often cast in the role of experimenter. Not only medicine, of course, but all scientific activity has social consequences, harmful as well as beneficent. However technical or abstract, the experiments which biological and physical scientists conduct in their laboratories and field stations may seem, ultimately they may affect the lives of men and women in powerful ways—both for good and for evil.
