BOOK REVIEWS 259

Lying Down in Church. G. C. HARDING. Churchman Pub- lishing, Worthing. No. of pages: 220. Price: E4.95.

For nine years Geoffrey Harding was Vicar to the City Church of St Mary Woolnoth in the heart of the City of London. It rapidly became clear to Geoffrey that stress was a major part of the everyday life ofthe office workers, bankers and others he met in the City. St Mary Woolnoth was well situated to address some of the problems of stress and Geoffrey’s own insights, gained through a long association with the Institute of Religion and Medicine and the Churches’ Council for Health and Healing, fitted him well for this task. Lying Down in Church is both an autobiographical account of these nine years and a very sound and readable approach for those who seek for a way of holding together body, mind and spirit.

In a very simple, but not simplistic, way the book describes the physiological and psychological com- ponents of stress and the fact that stress can be as much an ally as an enemy to health. There are descriptions of the sessions held in the Church by Geoffrey and the late Miss Laura Mitchell (a physiotherapist who special- ized in relaxation techniques). There are also useful

chapters looking at issues such as getting to know and coming to terms with one’s own body, with oneself and with life. While this is written from a Christian perspec- tive, it is not a narrowly Christian book. Here Geoffrey’s experience of working with people who may have had no religious commitment shows through. People are not dragooned into Christianity, but the need to find some- thing which will enable them to understand life experi- ences is clearly presented. For Geoffrey that is within the Christian faith, and the book ends with a chapter on coming to terms with death and, by exercising our curiosity, rediscovering a God who is relevant to our life experiences.

There are one or two typographical errors in the book, for example p. 2 has ‘that’ instead of ‘than’; p. 10 footnote should be 1978 rather than 1878 unless the article was prophetic! p. 25 has ‘plan’ instead of ‘plain’.

This is a very helpful book and I would hope that it would appeal to a much wider readership than those who already profess a religious faith.

PETER W. SPECK Chaplain, Royal Free Hospital, London

Endorphins in Reproduction and Stress. Edited by WOLFGANG DISTLER and LUTWIN BECK. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1990. No. of pages: 134. Price: DM 88.

Since three independent groups (in this book only one is quoted) reported discoveries of opiate receptors in 1973, scientists and laymen have experienced initial enthusiasm and later confusion. Perhaps the editors of Endorphins in Reproduction and Stress had in mind the earlier simplistic hypotheses and the lack of relevancy which have typified most endorphin studies when they promise ‘to cover relevant aspects and current state of knowledge regarding opioid peptide regulation of repro- duction function and stress response’. How does this col- lection of symposium articles succeed in the demanding task?

First of all, the book is delightfully slim. It consists of 14 short chapters ranging from preliminary reports to reviews. As a former basic scientist with later clinical and epidemiological experience, I was bothered by the mixture of overwhelming basic (rat) and scant human (clinical) data. Regulation of reproduction may be phy- siologically comparable among mammals, though I doubt it, but there is no rat model of human stress. Lack of definition of stress in most of the chapters leads to comprehension problems, which explains why the read- ing of this book requires unnecessary effort.

Topics are loosely organized under three headings: Opioids and endocrine secretion. Peripheral opioid secre- tion and Stress and opioids. The 134 pages are written by researchers from Germany, where the symposium was held in October 1989, Great Britain, Finland and Italy. In the first two sections they show that endogenous pep- tides are present (function?) at various regulation levels of the reproduction physiology.

The last part of the book is dedicated to ‘stress’, what- ever that is. In his contribution Grossman describes the significance of the opioid system in stress and raises an interesting analogy between pain and stress regulation by opioids. Readers already know how much more com- plicated interrelationships between pain and endogenous opioid peptides seem now than 15 years ago when the idea of ‘endogenous pain killers’ was introduced. I appre- ciated the critical review of Teschemacher and co- workers, titled ‘Beta-endorphin immunoreactive material in the plasma: What does it mean?’. Similar criti- cism can be recommended to other contributors of this book.

Much of the confusion caused by lack of definitions, heterogeneous topics and variable writing standards could have been avoided if the editors had prepared con- cluding remarks or a summarizing chapter.

MARKKU T. HYYPPA Rehabilitation Research Centre, Turku, Finland