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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 378-379



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Book Review

Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts


Penelope Gouk, ed. Musical Healing in Cultural Contexts. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000. xi + 223 pp. Ill. $69.95 (1-84014-279-0).

In this volume of essays, Penelope Gouk has placed music alongside the science of healing. As in her most recent book, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (1999), exploring the influence of music on natural magic and early modern experimental science, Gouk seeks to confirm centuries of anecdotal evidence concerning the relationship between two seemingly disparate disciplines (p. 4). In the current book, the outgrowth of a symposium, "Music, Healing, and Culture," held in London in 1997, Gouk has brought together a diverse group of distinguished scholars, each contributing an essay on a topic related to the power of music to heal within a particular culture or time period.

In addition to Gouk's fine introduction and final chapter "Sister Disciplines? Music and Medicine in Historical Perspective," there are eight other essays: Henry Stobart, "Bodies of Sound and Landscapes of Music: A View from the Bolivian Andes"; John M. Janzen, "Theories of Music in African Ngoma Healing"; Steven M. Friedson, "Dancing the Disease: Music and Trance in Tumbuka Healing"; Charles Burnett, "'Spiritual Medicine': Music and Healing in Islam and Its Influence in Western Medicine"; George Rousseau, "The Inflected Voice: Attraction and Curative Properties"; Linda Phyllis Austern, "'No Pill's Gonna Cure My Ill': Gender, Erotic Melancholy and Traditions of Musical Healing in the Modern West"; Cheryce Kramer, "Soul Music as Exemplified in Nineteenth-Century German Psychiatry"; and Lyn Schumaker, "The Dancing Nurse: Kalela Drums and the History of Hygiene in Africa."

Gouk's rationale for this present volume is that it is difficult to find material that places the healing and therapeutic applications of music in historical or cultural settings. The introduction, in addition to setting clear definitions and parameters, presents a critical review of the literature, followed by a meticulous summary of the framework for the symposium, reiterating a series of questions [End Page 378] that were sent to contributors in advance of the symposium. Each participant was asked to identify three basic themes: (1) "Identities or roles of musical healers," from ninth-century court physicians, to nineteenth-century German asylum physicians, to twentieth-century Tumbukan nchimi or prophet doctors, among others (p. 10). (2) "Sites and technologies of performance," or where the healing takes place, and the roles of instruments and voices, whether it be ngoma (the African word both for a drum and for a variety of healing activities in non-Western culture), or the importance of harmony and stringed instruments such as lutes and harps in promoting well-being in the West. (3) "Conceptualization of the non-verbal," or putting scientific analysis and research methodologies aside in favor of attempting to understand cultural differences in the philosophy of healing. Here, Gouk recommends revisiting the concept of "science" and looking beyond modern secular universities for alternative modes of understanding the power of music (p. 23).

What distinguishes this volume from other collections of conference essays is the true collaborative nature of the contributions, in part due to the preliminaries (the framed questions, precirculated papers, and the symposium format). Gouk also has mastered the art of synthesis, capitalizing on the work of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, which provides her with a rationale for paying close attention to the differences between Western and traditional forms of healing, and for avoiding the trap of assuming the superiority of Western medicine. Indeed, one of the strengths of this new collection is its expansion beyond the Eurocentric focus of previous studies on the subject of music and medicine. Gouk and her contributors' combination of methodological approaches might well become a model for future interdisciplinary ventures between musical and nonmusical disciplines.

 



Susan Forscher Weiss
Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University

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