Dietary therapy has always been important to medical practice even if it has more often been sacramental than physiological in effect. "You are what you eat" meant a lot to primitive tribes whose new leader had to eat part of his predecessor, and giving diets brought out the priest in the physician even if he or she had heard that "nothing that enters into a man defiles a man. " What people eat began to take on new meaning, however, a generation ago when Schoenheimer and others made clear that body fat and muscle protein were not the sluggish unchanging masses they had appeared but instead...

The functional and organic alterations of the colon constitute one of the leading reasons why patients consult gastroenterologists. The irritable colon is one of the most com- mon causes of discomfort in human beings. The organic pathology of the large bowel (malignancy and chronic inflammatory disease) contributes, particularly among Occi- dental peoples, to discouragingly high levels of morbidity and mortality. One realizes the importance of having a thorough physiologic knowledge of the colon in order to scientifically plan the functional treatment of organic colonic dis- eases. If we...

A fine team of state-of-the-art researcher/clinicians who know their fields, have contributed to the advancement of knowledge, and are in a position to judge what is truly important have here pooled their thoughts in a series of chapters on the cutting edges of gastroenterology. Four attributes render this volume superior to other update-oriented publications. The first striking feature, which is immediately evident upon scanning the table of contents, is the imaginative choice of subjects, ranging from trav eler's diarrhea and sexually transmitted GI infections through TPN and interventional...

Presenting patient- and problem-oriented review articles, this series is designed to keep the internist, general surgeon, and specialist in gastroenterology and hepatology abreast of the latest advances in the field.

In their second year in medical school, students begin to learn about the differences between disease and illness. In their studies of pathology they learn to understand disease as pertubations of molecular biological events. And we clinicians can show disease to them by our scans, lay it out even on our genetic scrolls, and sometimes even point out the errant nucleotide. Disease satisfies them and us; at Yale, lectures on the gastrointestinal tract run from achalasia to proctitis. There is, alas, little mention of functional bowel disease or of the irritable or spastic colon, for that is not...

Series Editor: Peter Calow, Department of Zoology, University of Sheffield, England The main aim of this series will be to illustrate and to explain the way organisms 'make a living' in nature. At the heart of this - their functional biology - is the way organisms acquire and then make use of resources in metabolism, movement, growth, reproduction, and so on. These processes will form the fundamental framework of all the books in the series. Each book will concentrate on a particular taxon (species, family, class or even phylum) and will bring together information on the form, physiology,...