Customer Reviews

The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine

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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.

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 .

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

Allow yourself to step back and listen to the stories of our modern age evolve and witness the cure within.

This book is still being written as we breathe and evaluate and marry experimental science with anecdotal evidence of powers that man has yet to explain. Even if we can not explain how the power works we can not dismiss that it exists and that science wants to know what it's all about.

Anne offers a clearly scripted map of how far man has come in explaining what we know and what we have still to know. And, she offers us the insight that learning unfolds in due time through the stories of each time. Each time has its own story based on its own parameters of experience. Beyond the notion of history, Anne sets the stage for an exciting future to come for all who continue to breathe. Yes, this is a good read.

My method for choosing books can be summed up by a single word: serendipity. I like to give chance a chance. To be true, I have my preferences. I like to read scholarly books in history, economics, social science, and international relations. But within these broad categories, I let myself be guided by personal whim and fortuitous encounters. A catchy title, an elegant book cover, or the blurbs by people I trust on the back jacket, can carry the day. I confess I am even sometimes influenced by Amazon reviews.

I had every reason not to pick up that book. The cover page, with the hand of a Buddha statue in a meditative position, evoked Eastern spirituality and esoteric rituals, things that leave me rather insensitive. The title reinforced that cautious impression, as The Cure Within could be construed either as a self-help manual or the tale of an inner journey, two categories I prefer to avoid. But here was the subtitle, A History of Mind-Body Medicine, which included two categories--history and medicine--that feature in my tag list. So I figured there was something for me in this book. I wasn't disappointed.

It is not easy to explain what this book is about. The expression "mind-body medicine" may not be familiar to all readers. It certainly wasn't for me. There is no obvious equivalent in my native language (I never heard of "la médecine du corps et de l'esprit"), and other terms that relate to the same field (psychosomatic medicine, behavioral medicine, holistic medicine, new age medicine, spiritual healing...) are either dated, limited to specialists, or code words for alternative practices only loosely related to medicine. As Anne Harrington explains, mind-body medicine is a rather new concept. Can there be a history of something that came only recently to existence, and which meaning has not yet solidified?

Mind-body medicine, a term that came into common parlance only in the 1990, is not a single approach to healing, but a recently constructed patchwork of quite distinct narrative traditions. It includes ancient Eastern healing practices, meditation, group therapy, the healing power of community, stress reduction, placebo healing, and various perspectives on the science behind it all. It has long been kept on the "kooky alternative margins of society": not so long ago, for a Harvard professor to commit oneself to studying the health benefits of meditation was considered a form of professional suicide. But it has since become more mainstream and gained center-stage attention, with many bestseller books and TV programs devoted to various aspects of the mind-body conundrum.

Anne Harrington doesn't waste much time explaining what her project is about. After a short introduction, where she explains what she means by stories and narratives, she enters the heart of the matter by investigating the power of suggestion throughout the ages. In the common modern narrative, the powers of suggestion depend on a Faustian bargain in which the patient yields her autonomy to an external authority, lays her trouble at his feet, and hopes to receive in return access to powers and experiences she could otherwise never hope to enjoy. On one side, this narrative draws on key elements within the centuries-old and now largely defunct narrative of demonic possession; on the other side, it draws just as heavily on the skepticism that has dogged possession and its successive secular analogues--first mesmerism, and then hypnosis--since at least the sixteenth century.

Already in 1598, the physician Michel Marescot proposed strict criteria to identify a case of possession as demonically inspired: being able to speak and understand languages of which the possessed person had no prior knowledge; being able to discern secrets and predict future events; demonstrating abnormal strength and insensitivity to pain; and consistently demonstrating revulsion at holy things such as contact with holy water, reading of Scripture, etc. But the very possibility of possession was later put in doubt (although the Catholic Church kept its exorcism rulebook practically unchanged until 1999). In the 1770s, the Viennese physician Anton Mesmer showed the same effects of exorcism over allegedly possessed persons could be produced simply waving hands over a patient's body, using "animal magnetism". A French royal commission pointed out in a secret annex to its report that some of the convulsions produced by mesmerism may have been sexual in nature--women were having orgasms under the close physical contact of the magnetizer.

As mesmerism gave way to magnetic somnambulism and then to hypnotism, the doctors soon got involved. Jean-Martin Charcot drew large audiences at La Salpêtrière by producing hysteric patients going through the discrete phases of catalepsy, lethargy, and somnambulism. Charcot's program was devastated when Hippolyte Bernheim showed he could reproduce all the symptoms and stages of major hysteria--and then proceed to change them or make them disappear, using suggestion. The last stage in the narrative on the power of suggestion is the codification of the placebo effect, which comes from the sheer authority of medicine and the comforting rituals of its practice, and that randomized controlled trials isolate--using placebo groups--in order to neutralize its effect upon the testing of a new medication.

This is, in short, the plotline of the first chapter ("The Power of Suggestion"). It was such a tour de force that I doubted the tempo could be maintained. But the second chapter ("The Body That Speaks"), and the following ones, kept this rapid pace of trailblazing analysis. Each chapter begins with the presentation of what the author calls a narrative, which provides us with a template and linguistic tropes that help us understand the larger meaning of specific stories we hear, read, or encounter in daily life. Many of these narratives have strong historical origins in the Christian tradition, as when Jesus' comment that "your faith has saved you" is used to illustrate the power of positive thinking. Particular attention is paid to the birth of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic discipline, but many other examples are drawn from the history of medicine, from psychology, and from the experimental sciences. The different pieces of the puzzle are drawn together at the end to make sense of the healing practices that have recently coalesced under the heading of mind-body medicine.

Here is how the author recaps her argument: "Today's mind-body medicine offers resources for proponents of doctor-led rituals who may also be skeptical of patients' own abilities to control and make sense of their own experiences ("The Power of Suggestion"); for those who believe in the healing power of the examined life ("The Body That Speaks"); for advocates of patient-initiated practices and those most skeptical of medicine's arrogance ("The Power of Positive Thinking"); for those most committed to the power of modern laboratory science to crack the secrets of the mind-body connection ("Broken by Modern Life"); and for those who are drawn to both the more folksy and homegrown ("Healing Ties") and the more exotic and romantic ("Eastward Journeys") form of medical, social, and moral redemption."

In my opinion, this is how popular history of science should be written. The text doesn't follow a conventional plotline, and is indeed quite experimental in style. Each chapter echoes each other and develops upon where the previous has left. The narratives create a patchwork of vignettes that help people make sense of everyday experience. It is very easy to get used to this non-linear plot, and history comes alive in the lively episodes of medical practice or experimental research that are exhumed from oblivion. This book also shows the direction that science studies should aim at. Social science approaches should not be antagonistic to science--as in the "science war" episodes, on which much ink has been spilled. As mind and body are made inseparable from each other in mind-body medicine, the author takes aim at the "two-cultures" approaches to knowledge, the same approach that puts the humanities buildings and the science laboratories on opposite sides of a university's campus. In fact, as many episodes in the book demonstrate, science has never been disenchanted, and popular books have always blended scientific knowledge with stories and lessons gained from everyday experience. Science studies can help scientists to interpret their science better and, through that effort, help us find "alternatives to our fractured approaches to our humanness".

Recommend the book for anyone interested in the history of mind-body medicine and related fields.

Not an easy book to read, The Cure Within is nonetheless the best summary of the state of mind-body medicine around. The author is a prodigious researcher, and brings the mind of a scientist and the heart of a historian to the subject matter; she reveals how we got to our present attitude toward mind-body medicine and in the process, connects the dots from ancient times to today.

However, the book is so dense with information that after finishing it, I felt forced to read it through once more, and in doing so, picked up a great deal more than I had the first time. It's also written in a monotone, as though the author were delivering it in one long, record-breaking breath. And yet, perhaps, that might have been wise, as the style deflects any sense of sensationalism or silliness in a subject that often attracts just that from other writers.

All in all, there are few books out there that display this kind of interdisciplinary wisdom and insightful commentary. However, as other reviewers have pointed out, she is careful to avoid a point of view; would she herself prefer acupuncture to anesthesia? Would she practice meditiation or take a valium? You have to guess.

I love this book! Anne Harrington offers an insightful and beautifully written history of human effort at healing. She has identified six narratives, which have deep cultural roots, as well as ties to science. These narratives are sometimes intertwined with scientific endeavors, and sometimes they survive simply as part of the popular culture. Anyone interested in mind-body healing will value The Cure Within.

This book is a comprehensive and fascinating history of human experiences with mind-body medicines, attempts to understand and utilize it, as well as investigate, explain or debunk it. It is not a how-to book, but rather a where, when and why book. The most profound lesson I took from The Cure Within, was that mind-body experiences are determined by our expectations of them, something that has changed dramatically over time.

Anne Harrington's book is a wonderful account of how we humans keep trying to figure ourselves out, and to define, "what it means to be human." It's a fascinating historical account that everyone should read.