In thirty-seven original essays written for this book, some of the world's leaders in healing explore their personal and professional experiences in order to uncover the underlying principles on which all healing rests. Rather than focusing on diverse techniques, the writers seek the "golden thread" that ties together the wide range of approaches to healing. In simple, direct language, the contributors explore the complex nature of healing from many viewpoints. We hear from physicians, psychologists, nurses, metaphysical healers, and shamans. Their topics include: what healing really is and how it takes place the power of the healer within what to look for in a healer the function of spirituality in healing the dramatic effects of the healing relationship the role of attitudes and emotions love as a healing force healing and death The result is a grand synthesis of heartfelt thinking that offers a treasury of profound insights for people in the healing professions, people who seek to develop their own healing capacities, people who wish to benefit from healers, and anyone interested in the magical properties of human relationships.

Healing is often discussed but infrequently studied. Schenck and Churchill provide a systematic approach to the elements that make clinician-patient interactions themselves a source of healing, based on comprehensive interviews with 50 physicians and alternative practitioners. The authors present a compelling picture of how healing happens in the practices of extraordinary clinicians.

This groundbreaking work examines the role of women in the Western healing traditions. Drawing on the disciplines of history, anthropology, botany, archaeology, and the behavioral sciences, Jeanne Achterberg discusses the ancient cultures in which women worked as independent and honored healers; the persecution of women healers in the witch hunts of the Middle Ages; the development of midwifery and nursing as women's professions in the nineteenth century; and the current role of women and the state of the healing arts, as a time of crisis in the health-care professions coincides with the reemergence of feminine values.

“By the study, experimentation and practice of natural healing, women are changing and charting the future of health care. Despite heavy resistance or lack of recognition from patriarchal medicine, they are nevertheless making positive changes that will continue and increase. Women’s emphasis on one-to-one work practiced in mutual agreement and participation is very different from mechanized and big-money medicine, and has results and successes far beyond expectations. The emphasis on self-healing returns health care to the consumer, to women’s lives and bodies, for the first time in centuries. The medical system cannot control a movement held in the hands of women, though it may try. Women are taking control again of healing, our daughter-right, for the first time since the matriarchies and the Inquisition.”—from the Introduction

This compelling book examines many amazing cases of spiritual healing - laying on of hands, absent healing, healing by hypnosis and much more.

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readers that ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world.

Three women--Joslow, West-Barker, and Mills--traveled across the US to meet, learn from, and record the stories of 14 practicing healers. The result of their journey in words and pictures is a testament to the lives and work of remarkable men and women. BOTMC selection. Photos.