When I read novels set in the 18th and 19th century I’d always wonder why all these ladies seemed to swoon at the slightest disturbance and need to carry smelling salts all the time. I used to think it was maybe their tight corsets, but actually it’s probably a cultural thing – they knew they were “expected” to swoon at bad news so they did. Just like you sometimes read about contagious fainting fits and all that in some countries – if it’s the culturally expected thing to do, that’s what people will do, almost subconsciously. The fact that the mind can so influence the body is the topic explored in this book.

Well, to be more precise, the history of the idea that the mind can influence the body is what’s explored in this book. It’s not a book that will tell you whether mind-body medicine really works, it’s more of a cultural history. I would like to know a bit more about current double-blind clinical studies exploring whether psychosomatic medicine really works, but I guess there aren’t a whole lot of those. In any case, the histories provided in this book are a good kicking-off point for exploring this controversial world and both lend some credence and some disbelief to the theories.

Harrington splits the book up into six themes. The first theme is the “Power of Suggestion” – hypnotism and all that – which she directly traces back to Catholic exorcism practices (but it actually goes back further: many cultures have possession beliefs and exorcism rites).

The second theme is “The Body That Speaks” – the idea that if you suppress traumas emotionally, the body will express them anyway through physical means (very Freudian).

The third theme is “The Power of Positive Thinking” – quite a recent phenomenon, but then if you connect it to the power of faith, then it becomes something quite old (miracles, Lourdes, etc). And then there’s all the research on the placebo effect that surprisingly shows that there is something to the theory that if you believe your medicine can cure you, it might – for certain classes of illnesses, including pain.

The fourth is “Broken by Modern Life” – the very modern, engineering-based theory that stress will wear your body out. Buttressed by scientific research on the “Type A personality” and the “fight vs flight response”, this is still widely held today.

The fifth and sixth themes are more “healing themes”. The fifth is “healing ties” – the theory that people who live in strong communities live healthier. The sixth is “eastward journeys” – the increasing popularity of alternative medicines and medical practices such as meditation, imported from the east.

One thing that is striking as Harrington traces these themes is how well they cleave to the dominant preoccupations of the times. Since the mind is influenced by culture, the mind-body connection must be mediated by culture too. These movements rise and fall in accordance to culture-wide changes in thinking (e.g. from religious towards scientific). Growing anxiety, particularly after the two world wars, also contributed to the “broken by modern life” theory.

In her conclusion Harrington briefly treats with whether these things really work. It’s clear that she wishes for it to be: she cites several pieces of historical evidence that would seem inexplicable by medicine alone. The most harrowing one is the story of two hundred cases of blindness among Cambodian women who were forced to witness the torture and murder of their loved ones. Their blindness had no physical basis, but was caused by their having “cried until they could not see”. But ultimately the physical reality of the mind-body connection is not the preoccupation of this book. Rather, it is the storied world of mind-body medicine that is explored, effectively and in an interesting way.