ABSTRACT
Despite the recent upsurge in interest in alternative medicine and unorthodox healers, Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe is the first book to focus closely on the relationship between belief, culture, and healing in the past. In essays on France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and England, from the sixteenth century to the present day, the authors draw on a broad range of material, from studies of demonologists and reports of asylum doctors, to church archives and oral evidence.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |21 pages
Demonic affliction or divinechastisement?
Conceptions of illness and healing among spiritualists and Mennonites in Holland, C.1530–C.1630
chapter |18 pages
A false living saint in Cologne in the1620s
The case of Sophia Agnes von Langenberg
chapter |21 pages
Charcot's demons
Retrospective medicine and historical diagnosis in the writings of the Salpêtrière school
chapter |22 pages
Conversions to homoeopathy in the ineteenth century
The rationality of medical deviance
chapter |19 pages
Women as Winti healers
Rationality and contradiction in the preservation of a Suriname healing tradition
