Fifth Annual Report on Stress, 1955-56

This current edition of the annual review of new developments in the field of "stress" follows the pattern of the previous ones. The first hundred pages are occupied by a summary of the concept of "stress" as developed by Selye and his colleagues. A great deal of this repeats material from previous editions, some of it word for word. A series of nine review articles is then inserted. These include a discussion of primary aldosteronism by Conn, the effects of hormones on inflammation by Dougherty, stress and the catechol hormones by von Euler, Seymour Gray on adrenal and gastric secretion, Dwight Ingle on the etiology of disease, Don Nelson on factors effecting adrenocortical secretion, Ernst Scharrer on neurosecretion, Spitz on psychiatric stress in infancy, and Stoerk on the lymphoid tissue, cortisone, and immunity. These authors are qualified and their reviews are interesting, although for the most part they don't add previously unpublished material. The remainder of the book, a total of 550 pages, is devoted to a bibliography arranged both in subject and author sequence. In addition to the bibliography, there is an index to the bibliography and a short handbook for interpreting the symbols which are used in bibliographic notation. The Fifth Annual Report of Stress, like its predecessors, will be of value to those who accept the basic tenets of Selye's approach to physiology, and the review section will also be of interest to anyone seeking an authoritative resume of recent advances in the areas under consideration.