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In the cases of 107 patients who reported unusual experiences during an illness or injury, such as seeing their own body from a different position in space, medical records were obtained for forty patients. These were examined and rated according to the evidence they provided of grave, life-threatening illness or injury. Eighteen patients (45%) were judged to have had serious, life-threatening illnesses or injuries, but twenty-two (55%) were rated as having had no life-threatening condition. Nevertheless, thirty-three (825%) of the patients believed that they had been "dead" or near death. Deficiencies in the medical records may account for a few of the discrepancies between patients' reports and medical records. However, it seems likely that an important precipitator of the socalled neardeath experience is the belief that one is dying-whether or not one is in fact close to death.In the past decade, numerous articles on the near-death experience (NDE) have appeared in magazines and newspapers and a few in scientific journals [ 1-31 .Near-death experiences have become widely known as the transcendent or mystical-type experiences that occur among many people who have come close to death or have even suffered an apparent clinical death during a severe illness or accident, but who then recover, are resuscitated, or escape serious injury. For 45 0 1989, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.

Beyond the Body is a greatly expanded version of her 1978 pamphlet, "Parapsychology and Out-of-the-Body Experiences," published for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). As in that earlier work, Dr. Blackmore in the present book examines past and present research on out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in order to compare the merits and weaknesses of the two primary approaches to understanding OBEs: that which says something (the soul, consciousness, the astral body, or whatever) leaves the physical body during an OBE; and that which says nothing leaves the body, the OBE deriving instead from physiological, psychological, or parapsychological processes originating "within" the body. Those looking for new case material, comprehensive case reports, or in-depth analyses of data will not find them here; the book is instead a broad survey intended primarily to introduce readers to the issues and approaches to research on OBEs. For those of us interested in neardeath experiences (NDEs), this book serves the invaluable function of reminding us of the context within which the NDE, seemingly a subspecies of the OBE, must be studied. Additionally, however, both for those interested primarily in NDEs and for those whose interests extend more broadly to the fields of psychical research and parapsychology, Blackmore's proposals confront us with important methodological questions about how we may most productively pursue research on OBEs and, by extension, on other apparently paranormal phenomena. Blackmore begins her book by describing her own remarkable OBE and by outlining the questions it later raised in her mind.

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