By “psychosomatic,” Pert did not imply the modern, often derisive dismissal of disease as a neurotic figment. Instead she meant the word’s strict scientific connotation: having to do with the oneness of the human psyche (mind and spirit) and the soma (the body), a oneness she did much to measure and record in the laboratory. Her discoveries, as she justly claimed, would help fuel “a synthesis of behavior, psychology, and biology.”1
