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Notes on “Midrash and Medicine. Healing Body and Soul in the Jewish Interpretive tradition”
The book is a collection of essays and articles that present the views of some of the most sensitive people to the ideas of jewish cultural tradition of midrash within the healthcare settings. The book is divided into themes, within each of them two different people present their perspective views on the given subject. These are not always the opposite views, I would rather call them complementary of each other. For example, in the first pair essays exploring the use of metaphors in the healing process both Rabbi Simka Y. Weintraub and Stuart Schoffman describe the use of metaphors in understanding of one’s illness and in accessing the healings. While…
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Notes on “Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves. Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion”
a book by by Rebecca Selligman This book describes an ethnographic study of the psychophysiology of Candomblé mediumship. Combining ethnography and psychophysiology proved to be hard, and the author describes several obstacles, including the difficulty of maintaining a balance between recruiting a large enough sample for the study to be valid and building a trusting rapport with the participants. The central premise of the book is that the process of self-transformation in Candomblé spirit possession mediumship is a process with the potential to heal both mind and body. This idea is based on the finding that all mediums that the author interviewed for the study had come to become mediums…
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Notes on “Health and Long Life The Chinese Way”
a book by Livia Kohn This book is a comprehensive guide through the Chinese system of viewing the person in the Universe. It is written in a very structured way, so that even those who are unfamiliar with the numerous words and concepts do not get confused and are able to grasp the idea of the Chinese view. The body in Chinese health and long life practices is a constantly moving and changing combination of different forms of Qi (life energy). The organs within the body are classified according to the five phases which correspond with the seasons and the Five elements, such as Wood, Metal, Earth, Water, and Fire.…
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Notes on “Healing Logics” edited by Erica Brady
This book is a collection of essays that was put together after the Utah State University’s conference on folk medicine, which made it evident that existing models of investigation and research proved to be limiting in exploration of the health belief systems that exist in multitude in the US. The general conclusion of this conference (and the collection of essays) is that these health belief systems are built on the bases of very diverse sources of authority, such as community and ethnic tradition, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, and persecutions of the formal medicine. Through the essays we can observe the relationship between these systems of authority being competing, conflicting, and…
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Notes on the book by Amanda Porterfield “Healing in the History of Christianity”
In this book Amanda Porterfield describes the course of the history of the healing traditions within Christian religion. In other words, she studies the history of Christianity through the prism of healing within it, and it works just right due to the fact that, as we find out, healing has always been central to the Christian faith. We are taken through the history of Christian thought and approaches starting from Jesus and ending with modern Christianity, and we see how the ideas of healing had changed within it, as, for example, the move inspired by Calvin from firm belief in the miracles of healing related to saints to the idea…
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Notes on the article by A.Viladrich “Beyond the Supernatural: Latino Healers Treating Latino Immigrants in NYC”
The article explores the role of Latino folk healers in adequately addressing immigrants’ health needs, including their potential to complement or replace formal access to health care services. “More than competing with other healing businesses, [Latino healers] are filling a gap by providing cultural meaningful treatments while satisfying Latinos’ unmet needs…. Botanicas offer personalized response to problems that would either receive little attention or remain unattended otherwise”(p. 144) This quote states an important point – that besides the actual healing practice, besides the ceremonies and selling the herbal supplements, the botanicas provide the necessary spiritual care to patients, who would not be able to receive this care anywhere else. This…