In this book, a pioneer in "integrated medicine" helps readers see the myriad ways their environment may affect their health. Leo Galland, MD, is an internationally respected expert in nutritional medicine and a founder of Functional Medicine. He received his education and medical training at Harvard and NYU, and is the author of two highly acclaimed books. He has appeared on Good Morning America , CNN, and PBS. IN RESTAURO   With its cold, marble floors, gray walls, and cavernous ceiling, the room reminded me of a ward in the old Bellevue Hospital, where I’d spent my medical internship. The patients here, blighted and broken, lay silently in rows, tended with a reverence I had never seen in any hospital. Most were very old, four hundred to seven hundred years old, medieval altarpieces and Renaissance paintings sent from museums and churches to this hospital for sick works of art, Laboratori di Restauro, on the grounds of a fortress near the center of Florence. Botticelli’s Coronation of the Virgin, ready for discharge after ten years of painstaking restoration, stood leaning against a wall. Forty years it had spent on its back in the damp and musty basement of the Uffizi Gallery, its vibrant colors hidden by a brown scum of dust and mold, smelling like aged cheese and peeling so badly from a prior restoration that the picture would have fallen in flakes had it remained upright. Nearby, a Raphael Madonna awaited her return to the Palazzo Pitti. In a far room stood a ceiling-high crucifix, painted by Giotto in 1296, recently admitted from the Church of Santa Maria Novella. I had looked for it in the church’s sacristy the week before and found only its photograph and the familiar sign, IN RESTAURO (In Restoration), which confounds art lovers throughout Italy. Today I was able to climb the scaffolding and inspect Giotto’s masterpiece face to face. To stand in the mysterious place where restauro actually happens filled me with such excitement that I found it hard to concentrate on the purpose of my visit.   The enemies of paintings are also the enemies of people: physical injury, bacteria, fungi, and air pollution, which hastens the ravages of time and of light. Successful art restoration requires detailed scientific support, the reason why Restauro seems more like a hospital than a studio. Before 1500, most paintings were made with a mixture of egg yolk, vinegar, and plant and mineral pigments applied over several layers of aged gypsum and parchment-glue to pieces of wood stuck together with cheese and limestone. Left undisturbed and protected from light, these are the most permanent paintings that humankind has yet invented. Their colors don’t darken with age, as do those of oil paintings, but shine out brightly when the grime of centuries is removed. They were rarely left undisturbed, however. Varnishing, overpainting, cosmetic trimming, and botched restoration have joined forces with microbial parasites to damage them all. Even Mona Lisa, an oil painting whose colors have dimmed from their initial liveliness to a murky gloom, had a swatch of her panel sliced off in the seventeenth century to accommodate a new frame, distorting Leonardo’s complex perspective.   The technicians of Restauro use X ray, ultrasound, and infrared thermography to define the layers of a painting, detect revisions, and discover the artist’s original charcoal sketch. Minute fragments of paint and priming are removed for microscopic and chemical analysis and microbial culture. Under high magnification, the color of paint fractures into its component primary pigments. Blue azurite and red cinnabar are revealed from purple, the richness of color directly related to the coarseness of granules in the paint. The chemistry of restoration must distinguish mineral pigments from plant dyes and the curious lake pigments formed from lac, dead insects mummified in the sap of living trees. Chemical assay can reveal the artist’s original intent. Blue salts of copper, limestone, and ammonia lose ammonia to turn green with age. Precise analysis suggests the proper treatments. Old varnishes, if their composition is known, can now be safely removed with tailor-made enzymes rather than with corrosive solvents. White lead, darkened by the sulfur in air pollution, can be blanched by hydrogen peroxide, with no harm to other pigments. Mold growth can be removed mechanically; no chemical methods have been found that are both effective and safe. It was the mold problem that first led me to Restauro on a wintry morning in 1990, to consult with the laboratory’s microbiologists, Iseta Tosini and Maria Rizzi, who were searching for a safe way to remove mold. I went there to help them by drawing upon my experience with natural antibiotics. I left enriched by a vision of their work that raised my hopes for my own profession.   Art restoration owes so much to medical technology that restoration directors often compare their work to medical care. Laboratori