ABSTRACT
The transcultural association between religion and healing is long-standing and well known. In ancient Japan, physicians were believed to be descendants of the sun goddess, the first healer, who passed her divine healing knowledge down to them. The first Chinese medical texts were attributed to three legendary divine emperors for whom both disease and cure were the result of spirit forces in nature. The roles of priest and physician were concentrated in one person in Taoism and Buddhism: the power to heal being linked to knowledge of natural and supernatural elements. The strong relation between religion and medicine was evident in the Indian belief that illness was caused by the accumulation of harmful karma. Tibetan medicine was exclusively the province of religion, being taught and practiced only in Buddhist monasteries. In the Hebrew Bible, illness and health were seen as God’s punishment or reward for moral transgression, and New Testament stories show that Jesus instructed his disciples in healing through “casting out” unclean spirits. Islam prescribed a variety of religious rituals for ridding the body of jinn (demonic entities) believed to be carriers of disease.
