ABSTRACT
Ideas about close links between people's health and their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors date back thousands of years. For example, Biblical wisdom instructed that “A merry heart does good like a medicine” (Proverbs ch. 17, v. 22), and the ancient Greek medical approach of Hippocrates and his followers observed that the likelihood of disease could be affected by a person's work, nutrition, environment, and natural constitution. By the early 17th century, Shakespeare would invent the term “heart-ache” to capture the links between psychological distress and bodily pain (Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 1), and philosopher René Descartes was puzzling over relations between the mind (or soul) and the physical body. In all societies, in all times, certain individuals are designated to play the role of healer, treating patients using a wide variety of rituals, rites, and remedies (King, 1962). Yet age-old conceptions of distress, disease, behavior, and health were not amenable to scientific analysis until the emergence of psychology and modern biology in the late 19th century.
