Blood ties arc not the only ones that deserve to be called familial, as a journalist learned in the course of researching family life. Relatives sometimes fail to be friends, but with luck, friends can be transformed into relatives, tribesmen, members of one’s clan.

The Medical Director of the New York State Office of Mental Health explains the misunderstood art of diagnosis in the medical specialty where, in even the sickest patients, the best blood tests and imaging studies often appear normal.

An American by birth, who with her husband the Marchese Antonio Origo look a leading part in the Italian underground during the war, IRIS ORIGOhas done most of her writing on their farm in Tuscany and in Rome. She is a biographer by choice, and her books include a life of Leopardi, a short study of Byron’s daughter, and THE LAST ATTACHMENT, an account of Byron’s love affair with Countess Guiccioli. The essay which follows is drawn from the Ann Radcliffe lecture which the Marchesa delivered in Cambridge last autumn.