Just published is a new edition of Rusk's classic comprehensive work, encompassing most aspects of rehabilitation medicine, mainly as it pertains to patients in outpatient or rehabilitation facilities. There is diminished emphasis on the more acute problems encountered in a general hospital setting.
As in former editions, an excellent philosophy pervades this book. For example, if treatment is to be effective, the physician must recognize such attitudes of the patient as dependence or hostility. The patient must participate actively in his rehabilitation. We must become widely enthusiastic about ingenious organic explanations of pain, but must recognize many new techniques of treatment as variations of desirable positive suggestion.
Again we are taught that rehabilitation is everybody's business, particularly that of the patient's own physician, regardless of his specialty, and that the need to help the patient in his everyday personal and humble tasks must not be beneath our scope.