It is also subject to the strains, stresses and trials involved in the application of many disparate skills and techniques to the problems, some of them almost intractable to scientific inquiry, of essentially personal services where emotion tends to overwhelm reason.
This poses the need for a theory to embrace the mechanisms and their effective functioning. Inevitably the universities will have a key role in any structure and its development.
This volume gives some indication of what a unit based on a university outstanding in its attitude to and role in medical care, including the role in speculative thinking which is no indulgence but an essential power drive of its own. It also gives some idea of the range of problems involved, the solution to which does not depend on the university or unit itself, but on the cooperation of the DHSS, the health authorities, and the academic community and on the awareness of the potential of such units on the part of all concerned with research.