Product Description

Lays bare the history behind mind-body healing. People suffering from serious illnesses improve their survival chances by adopting a positive attitude and refusing to believe in the worst. Stress is the great killer of modern life. Ancient Eastern mind-body techniques can bring us balance and healing. We’ve all heard claims like these, and many find them plausible. When it comes to disease and healing, we believe we must look beyond doctors and drugs; we must look within ourselves. Faith, relationships, and attitude matter. But why do we believe such things? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this vibrant history describes our commitments to mind-body healing as rooted in a patchwork of stories that have allowed people to make new sense of their suffering, express discontent with existing care, and rationalize new treatments and lifestyles. These stories are sometimes supported by science, sometimes quarrel with science, but are all ultimately about much more than just science. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #240446 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Over the past several years, numerous medical reports have confirmed the connection between a positive mental attitude and good physical health. In this splendid book, Harrington (The Placebo Effect), chair of Harvard's history of science department, demonstrates that the belief in such a connection between mind and body is nothing new. She uses case studies and stories of healings to show how deeply embedded the idea of positive mental health is in the quest for physical health, as well as the ways that contemporary medicine has incorporated a focus on mind-body healing into its black bag. In her highly original analysis of this history from ancient times to the present, she discovers six different narratives about mind-body healing. These include the power of suggestion, the power of positive thinking and broken by modern life. In the body that speaks narrative, for instance, Harrington traces the idea that physical symptoms are the outward expression of the mind's secrets, and that revealing those secrets can heal, whether the revelation takes place in the confession box or on the analyst's couch. Harrington's study offers a first-rate cultural history of an age-old but still much debated topic.
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Review
Harrington...has expertly mapped the transmission of mind-body ideas...showing us where they come from and why exactly they seem to have nine lives. (Amanda Schaffer - Slate )

This brilliant study ... concludes that 'mind-body medicine is a deeply storied world.'
(Barbara Fisher - Boston Globe )

About the Author
Anne Harrington, professor and chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard University, is the author of Reenchanted Science and the editor of The Placebo Effect and The Dalai Lama at MIT. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

A Confusing Message
Whenever a first-class scholar, like this one, writes a careful, data-based book, which is at the same time accessible to the intelligent lay person, we must be grateful.

This volume tells us much of the history, in the United States, of the various mind-over-body schemes: psychoanalysis, Transcendental Meditation, bio-feedback, Christian Science, and others. Nobody interested in modern American history can afford to ignore this story.

But I also found the book profoundly confusing. The author wants to tell us about these movements and how they were received by the public, but she has little interest, it seems, in the truth value behind the claims of these popular movements. Does bio-feedback, for instance, really help in reducing stress ? For that matter, is there such a thing as "stress" in the sense that the proponents of these movements have in mind ? Truth or untruth are things that hold little interest for this author.

Harrington generally tells the story of the beginnings of these movements as a series of successes, and then, for some reason, time and again, "things begin to unravel," as she has to state time and again. With all her sympathies for "mind-over-body," sympathies that dominate her "narratives" (a favorite phrase of hers), it turns out, generally, and in stark contrast to her enthusiasms, that things don't work out after all, and it would seem -- though she never says this -- that it's probably best to be cynical about the whole lot of these movements.

A History Of Alternative Medicine
Anne Harrington has written a comprehensive account of the impact of the healing approaches outside mainstream medicine. Call it mind-body, call it new age, it is an approach that is as old as the Bible with the cures of Jesus. It is not new to our society. Her history traces the mind-body connection stretching from Bibical era to our own, with the bulk of the book focusing on the Age of Enlightenment forward. She has written this definitive history in an unbias and readable fashion .

A masterful synthesis
Professor Harrington provides a masterful synthesis of Mind-Body Medicine. I was a skeptical chemist who spent most of his working life in the midwest before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. For five years I looked askance at the smorgasbord of alternative healing that flourishes here. Eventually a new wife persuaded me to try acupuncture for tennis elbow. I have not looked back. I claim no miracle cures but do now have the glimmerings of understanding my mind-body as a marvellously inter-connected system with endless possibilities for feedback from every sensory modality. Harrington has great understanding of the mind-body system. The rigor of her approach and the clarity of her writing style make The Cure Within both thought provoking and a delight to read.

Lance Reynolds
Alameda, CA