Cancer, Stress, and Death

This book has been well received in many places and in many countries. It was awarded a ranking in the top ten publications on behavioral medicine in the year that it first appeared. When, in 1977, we began to fit the components of Cancer, Stress, and Death together, the established medical view was that each subject repre­ sented a different discipline, and that to integrate fields so diverse in information content was to seek to achieve a synthesis beyond reasonable limits. Had we been required to concern ourselves with the knowledge of each component in its entirety, this might have been so, but our concern, of course, was to integrate only those items of knowledge in any one field that could bear upon the field of interest of another. Moreover, we were concerned that physi­ cians and scientists take account of the inner forces that shape motivation and individual behavior, as well as the cultural identity of individuals, and we hoped that the biopsychosocial way in which we believed would gain ground and win support. Now, with need for a second edition, one can hardly conceive of not bringing together diverse contributions in one volume. Such syntheses as we have made clearly confirm that one can arrive at several levels of understanding of human situations through wise integration of biological paradigms within various social, cultural, and psychological parameters-which essentially is a simple way of defining the biopsychosocial way.