To the Editor.—
A review of the book by Günter Ammon, Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics (241:1939, 1979), notes that "in 1922 one of Freud's followers, Felix Deutsch, a Viennese psychiatrist, seemed set to unravel the secrets of mind-body interaction when he coined the term psychosomatic." It was, in fact, Johann Christian Heinroth (1773-1843), author of Lehrbuch der Stoerungen des Seelenlebens, who is generally credited with having coined the term "psychosomatic medicine."1Heinroth was concerned with mental illness as a disease of the soul, with sin as a cause of disease, and with psychotherapy, classification of mental illness, and the history of these subjects. He first used the term "psychosomatic" in 1818, but psychosomatic medicine as a field of scientific study and clinical evaluation clearly developed most intensively only during the past few decades, having come into special prominence after 1935, the publication date of Dunbar's2 survey. Ackerknecht3 comments