The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (review)

Anne Harrington’s new book is a wonderful alternative to the usual sagas of biomedical triumphalism that still dominate the literature of medical history. Harrington works from the premise that the physicalist understanding of medicine, according to which the occurrence of symptoms and the efficacy of therapies depend exclusively on events in the biological body, is only one of the possible “stories” that can legitimately be told about medicine and its history. She makes a powerful case for the alternative perspective of mind-body medicine, which presumes that there is much more to be said about why human beings fall sick and sometimes surprisingly recover than is captured in the story of their biological parts alone. Harrington argues that there are, in fact, six “narrative templates” around which alternative stories of great persuasiveness have regularly been constructed. She calls these “the power of suggestion,” “the body that speaks,” “the power of positive thinking,” “broken by modern life,” “healing ties,” and “eastward journeys.”

These six narrative templates each get a chapter and provide The Cure Within with its taxonomy and organizing framework. Harrington begins her historical arc in “The Power of Suggestion” by discussing religious exorcism, where she finds the first examples of powerful, charismatic men effecting major changes in biological bodies by somehow opening “channels of communication between . . . mind and body that are normally impassable” (p. 33). She then moves to Franz Anton Mesmer in the eighteenth century and his secularization of exorcism via animal magnetism. From Mesmer she carries the story forward to nineteenth-century hypnotism, the work of Jean-Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim, and eventually to Harry Beecher’s investigation of placebos in the 1950s. Harrington starts “The Body That Speaks” (i.e., the body that contains psychogenic etiological messages for those who can decode them) with Sigmund Freud and the beginnings of psychoanalysis, moves on to shell-shocked soldiers in World War I and German and American psychosomatics in the 1920s through the 1950s, and ends with posttraumatic stress disorder. In “The Power of Positive Thinking,” she sweeps from Lourdes and “faith cures” in the nineteenth century to Christian Science and New Thought, to Norman Vincent Peale and Norman Cousins, and to contemporary explorations of placebos. In “Broken By Modern Life,” she focuses on “stress” and covers the work of, among others, Walter B. Cannon, Hans Selye, Roy R. Grinker, Meyer Friedman, and Roy Rosenman (on Type A personalities) as well as Robert Ader (on psychoneuroimmunology). In “Healing Ties,” she covers the work of Sidney Cobb, John Cassel, David Spiegel, and others on social support and health. Finally, in “Eastward Journeys,” she discusses transcendental meditation and its movement from counter-cultural encounter to medical exploration, Western involvement with Chinese acupuncture and qigong, and the Dalai Lama’s role in supporting the investigation of the effects of traditional meditation with the tools of modern neuroscience.

Much of what Harrington has to say in her discussion of the first four narrative templates is based on the work of other scholars, but she amplifies their work with her own research and consistently fresh readings of the primary and secondary literature. Her writing is lucid and confident, and her interpretations and reinterpretations are impressively synthetic and often strikingly original. Her work in “Healing Ties” and “Eastward Journeys” is even better, because here she adds much from her own investigations, some of them based on long interviews with key players and some on movingly described participant observation experiences.

I would quibble with a number of points. Where, for example, is the discussion of the long tradition of emotions and disease discourse in Western medicine, a discourse that goes back at least to Galen and is centrally present until it is temporarily displaced in the nineteenth century by monofocal enthusiasm for patho-anatomy and bacteriology? Where, too, are the biopsychosocial approaches that have been so prominent in recent decades? Also, it is not always easy to tell where Harrington is...