The Healers

Human suffering is inevitable, and it is universal. It has provoked in societies a deep desire to fix, to restore, and to mend. That yearning to heal is physical and metaphysical; science and art; objectivity and intimacy. To do so one must touch the flesh but also that inner essence called spirit or soul. In that regard, healing involves what can be understood—the disease—and what eludes scientific understanding—the illness. It is the illness, perhaps, that is most confounding, involving not only pathological processes at play but also the emotive reactions to them. To pursue both is the aim of modern healing. Many refer to this as healing of body and soul—holistic healing. One without the other is incomplete, deceptive, and perilous. While elucidation of human afflictions and remarkable advances in eradicating them has resolutely advanced, soulful healing is more abstract and, at times, terribly convoluted, even unorthodox.

The Healers: Physicians, Spiritualists, and Shamans in the Search for Holistic Health illustrates attempts through history to address the parallel psychological conundrums brought by sickness. Complexities of body and mind stymied practitioners in their pursuit of physical and spiritual cures. All types of healers weighed in: scholars, shamans, and self-proclaimed spiritualist, spanning antiquity to modern times. And all too often their efforts drifted into the metaphysical, if not the supernatural. Gods and goddesses abounded in reality or in imagination to descend and bestow healing measures to the wretched. Real or not, a divine presence conferred comfort, hope, and reassurance, as if an invisible human core somehow connected to intangible spheres apart from a capricious and dangerous natural world. Among those men and women were members of the ancient cult of Asclepius, the Lakota holy man Black Elk, and the modern-day humanist, Harvard professor Edward Churchill. Individuals such as these shaped our concept of holistic healing. Theirs are remarkable stories of compassion, selflessness, and enlightenment. In embracing the miserable, they showcased the transcendent human spirit and its capacity to despair but also to hope and heal. Many found that the illness—the unspoken, private turmoil sickness wrought—was far more malignant than the destructive processes causing it. In many instances, equanimity, not panacea, became the goal. What lessons have these figures taught us through history? What inroads—be they cultural, psychical, or mystical—were paved to allow insight to the ravages of illness and the hopes for a healing process? This book may give some answers.

Thomas Helling, MD, is a tenured Professor of Surgery at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. He is the author of several books, including Desperate Surgery in the Pacific War: Doctors, Damage Control, and America’s Wounded 1941-1945 for which he was awarded the Harry D. Langley Book Prize by the Society for the History of Navy Medicine in 2019 and The Great War and the Birth of Modern Medicine. Helling currently resides in Madison, Mississippi and Lenexa, Kansas. Learn more about his publications at thomashelling.com.

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