Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? Psychosomatic illness in children: a modern synthesis.

My tlide, taken from the King James Bible, became rather more apt when I tumed to the New Enlish Bible of 1970. Here the word "thought" is more precisely translated as "anxious thought"; and it is the rela¢i between anxious thought and stature, between emotional and bodily processes, that I am discussing. This lecture commemorates Charles West, to whom children's hospitals and children owe so much. I cannot find that he used the word psychosomatic, though it was Imown in his time. Like Willis and Sydenham before him he did, however, describe patients with what today would be labelled psychosomatic disorders. When he did so, admittedly under the broad heading of Malingerng, he logically ruled out organic disease. Since his time psychosomatics has turned from speculations to hard facts in this age of manicured medicine. It has a special appeal because it lends itself to the controls of biological science and to measurement. In Ryle's memorable phrase, we are learning to "measure the measurable, and make measurable the immeasurable." If you are politely surprised to have listened so far without hearing a definition of psychosomatic illness, prepare yourselves for more. I do not propose to define the term.