Customer Reviews

Magic, myth and medicine

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I picked this up from the local library in lieu of Stephen Barrett's "The Vitamin Pushers", which was apparently brought home by a patron years ago and never returned. Though some of the medical knowledge within shows its age, it's astonishing how little the state of "natural" and "alternative" medicine has changed. The arguments for herbal cures and sympathetic magic haven't developed in the nearly forty years since this was published, though the body of evidence in favor of more modern techniques certainly has!

I found this book particularly valuable because of its focus not merely on presenting the differences between the modalities, but on investigating why we believe the things we believe. The author discusses how and why superstitions developed, how we came to recognize and employ botanical sources of medicine, and how these natural sources developed into what we know today as pharmaceuticals. It's also an interesting snapshot of which alternative modalities were of interest at the time, and which had recently fallen by the wayside.