From February to the middle of July 1942, a study was carried out in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a study of starvation, conducted by the Jewish physicians in the two largest hospitals in the ghetto. The results of this study show the changes undergone by the human body when not enough food is available. This is the story of that study. The information about the study is true. The background of the physicians who took part in the study is as close to accurate as possible. The motivation for the study, how they got the equipment, and how they smuggled out the manuscript, is fiction. "This story ... is a historical novel in the truest sense. Together the fact and the fiction will give you, the reader, an understanding of an extraordinary scientific event that helped a people define itself during one of the saddest chapers of its existence."--Page 4 of cover.