Is stress a deadly disease on the rise in modern society? Are good friends the best medicine? Can mind-body practices from the east help us become well? Many of us think so. Doctors and drugs are often not enough, we think; we must also seek the cure within.

But why do so many of us believe this? From psychoanalysis to the placebo effect to meditation, this lively, sweeping history shows how our commitments to mind-body healing practices have deep cultural roots in stories; storites with histories that can be told. One skeptical story about the power of suggestion tells us that people under the infuence of charismatic authority figuers can have bodily experiences that look biological but turn out to be 'all in the mind.' Another story tells us that the body can be made ill by the mind's painful secrets but that healing is possible when minds confront those secrets. A third insists that, no matter how grave an illness may be, our continuing hope in recovery can itself heal through the power of positive thinking.

And so it goes. While sometimes supported by science and sometimes at odds with it, all those stories are about more than science alone. They are also about displaced religious yearnings, discontents with existing care, adn anxieties over the cost of modernity. Their persistence in our culture reminds us that people have to make sense of suffering, and that illness and healing are not just biological but ultimately human experiences.

Ann Harrington, professor and chair of the History of Science Department at Harvard University, is author of Medicine, Mind, and the Dobule Brain and Reenchanted Science, and editor of The Placebo Effect and The Dalai Lama at MIT. She lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

'Anne Harrington has given us a valid understanding of what it means to be human. Her insightful unifying synthesis changes us for the better.'-Herbert Benson, author of Timelss Heailng and The Relaxation Response

'A remarkable achievement. This important, well--informed, and remarkably well-balanced book will be accessible to any thoughtful reader yet indispensable for scholars in a variety of medical and social science fields. In an area marked by polemic and advocacy, Harrington has written with a consistent intellectual enthusiasm, informed by critical insight and a constructive detachment.'-Charles Rosenberg, Ernest Monrad Porfessor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, and author of The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction Stories, science, and culture under the skin
Chapter One The power of suggestion
Chapter Two The body that speaks
Chapter Three The power of positive thinking
Chapter Four Broken by modern life
Chapter Five healing ties
Chapter Six Eastward journeys
Conclusion Making sense of mind-body medicine
Notes
Select bibliography
Index