The increased attention paid to obesity as an important factor in the etiologic and pathogenic relations of many pathologic conditions makes this book particularly appropriate at this time. Much less attention has been paid to leanness, but in this monograph Rony has attempted, successfully, incidentally, to show systematically that these two abnormal conditions of the body are "facets of a single problem."
The first section of the book, some 210 pages, is divided into two parts, the first having to do with the physiologic relations of fats and fatty tissue and the second with the pathogenesis of obesity and of leanness. In this particular section the author deals with the role that is played by caloric intake and output, by the endocrine system and by the nervous system. In the first portion, so far as caloric intake is concerned, he stresses the fact that most fat people have abnormal appetites,