Minds, Bodies, Readers: I. Healing, Meditation, and the History of Reading

Rosenbach Lectures, University of Pennsylvania, 1999; reprinted as delivered, with small additions to the bibliography. The theme of the lectures is the historical relationship between mind-body healing and meditative reading in Western culture between Late Antiquity and the present. In the first lecture, the author traces the connection between healing, reading, and meditation in Western and non-Western cultures, arguing that the subject has been inadequately discussed in the history of medicine and religion. The second lecture, which is also historical in focus, compares the functions of meditation in healing and in reading, drawing attention to both continuities and discontinuities in comparative development. The third lecture focuses on the clinical use of meditation in medicine and the relations between reading, meditation, and the narrative of disease.