Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe doc

[...]... the ways in which people have conceived and explained illness, and reactions to illness, in Western Europe from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century They are concerned with what we want to label the ‘cultural repertoires’ of illness and healing They investigate approaches to illness and healing by doctors and other healers, along with their (potential) clients: persons of ‘high’ and ‘low’... for instance, Lucinda M.Beier, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London and New York, 1987) and Matthew Ramsey, Professional and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830 (Cambridge, 1988), who analyzes interactions between patients and healers primarily in terms of a network Chapter 1 Magical healing, witchcraft and elite discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century... set itself in motion, though, interestingly, the advocates of homoeopathy did not refrain from claiming a ‘scientific’ status for homoeopathy at the same time Many more examples, not included in this volume, could be added: faith -healing and pilgrimages, Christian Science and anthroposophy in the religious sphere, mesmerism and its variants and types of paranormal healing and New Age healing forms,... essays in this volume all focus on specific problems— and most of them go beyond the descriptive level—there is a common denominator, namely the interest in how and why particular people or groups came to conceive and explain illness, and reacted to it in the way they did In other words: how and why have cultural repertoires of illness and healing been constructed and reproduced?13 While this is certainly... and ‘low’ rank, men and women Taken together, the essays contribute to our knowledge and understanding of continuity and change in cultural repertoires of illness and healing A central issue addressed in this volume is to what extent the approaches to illness and healing have become ‘disenchanted’ during this long period or, for that matter, have remained or become ‘enchanted’ and thus accepted as... eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers successively reported on magical healing and witchcraft in France Although in the eighteenth century practitioners of witchcraft and magical healing were depicted as cynical unbelievers—‘swindlers’ and their patients as ‘dupes’, this Enlightenment interpretation was in the nineteenth century joined by another, ethnological and more romantic view of ‘popular medicine’... been shown that ‘black’ and ‘white’ witchcraft were closely linked in the prosecutions carried out in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in such regions as Lorraine and the Jura mountains;9 theologians and jurists commonly lumped together as witches and Satan’s henchmen all those who used occult arts, including practitioners of magical healing and devins-guérisseurs (cunning folk) who claimed to... undesirable Thus, language could be instrumental in legitimating one’s own repertoire of illness and healing, and in rejecting what deviated from this Healers often tried to strengthen their claim to knowledge by using jargon or Latin terminology It must have been difficult for many of their patients to understand them, certainly if the healer was a stranger and addressed them in a foreign language, like the... eighteenthcentury Holland, Matthew Ramsey for France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Enrique Perdiguero for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Alicante in Spain We are moreover confronted with a considerable variety of old and new religious, occult, magical and (other) alternative repertoires of illness and healing up to the present day In addition to Ramsey, de Waardt and Perdiguero, who... Belief in ‘tradition’, for example, in the healing powers of Winti ritual (Van Wetering), directs trust towards those sharing and promoting this belief Belief in demonic interference in human affairs, as generated at universities in the later medieval and early modern period (Clark), directed trust to those propagating this belief rather than to those who were sceptical Belief in ‘scientific’ medicine . Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe Despite the recent upsurge in interest in alternative medicine and unorthodox healers, Illness and. Hilary Marland and Anne Marie Rafferty Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe Edited by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland and Hans de