The phrase medical humanities' has a currency that is wider than any agreement as to what it means. This book asks questions and offers answers about the meaning of actual symptoms and of the concept of symptom' as a prelude to a cumulative interdisciplinary understanding of illness as a source of human need, and clinical medicine as a human response to it.

In this book the author argues that human musical understanding is rooted in the traditions of culture and that experience of music depends crucially on what the individual brings to it.