Walter Kempner: Editor's Note

So radically has the medical view of hypertension changed in the past 30 years that the recent series of national task force programs sponsored by the National Heart and Lung Institute gave but little mention of the dietary treatment program for hypertension that the Archives has chosen to review in some detail in this issue. The sharp contrast between the impact of the rice diet treatment for hypertension that occurred in the late 1940s and the almost forgotten status of that regimen in the 1970s merits comment. It is clear that the drug treatment of hypertension and the specific surgical treatment of modifiable or removable causes of hypertension have provided less cumbersome and less discommodious types of therapy. When the rice diet treatment was enunciated, it demonstrated that malignant hypertension was a reversible illness, and it surely gave new heart to investigators and clinicians to pursue diligently other avenues of