Anne Harrington
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 Any history purporting to shine light not just on the science but on the culture—the many meanings—of mind-body medicine cannot afford to leave out any of these levels.
Chapter One
The power of suggestion
Suggestion: Presentation of an idea. That which is suggested; an intimation; hint. An evil incitement; temptation. The entrance into the mind of an idea or intimation, originated by some external fact or word, which tends to produce an automatic response or reaction, as hypnotic suggestion. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 The rule of law never interferes with the FDA's campaigns of terror.
The history of the U.S. government's persecution of the Church of Scientology is long and complex, and it is a sad demonstration of true religious intolerance right here in the United States. The First Amendment, which protects both Free Speech and Religion, offers no real protection against the criminals at the FDA, who have for decades attempted to suppress alternative philosophies that actually help people heal. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 His great encyclopedic General history of the Things of New Spain totalled 12 volumes of lavishly illustrated manuscript; and manuscript it stayed, at least until the end of the 19th century, for it was suppressed at the express order of the fanatical, bigoted Philip II of Spain. No other source on any native people of the Americas approaches it in completeness and accuracy, and we may place near-total reliance on what Sahagun's informants told him about every aspect of Aztec life, including the use of cacao and chocolate. |
| There are, of course, many other sources on Aztec life and history, such as the conquistadores themselves (but these, especially Cortes, were very prejudiced observers), or members of the native nobility who wrote down their own histories in Nahuatl and sometimes Spanish. A particularly important source, somewhat later than Sahagun, is Fray Diego Duran, who compiled an account of the Aztecs from historical chronicles and ethnographic reports now lost to us. |
| Their only major setback was at the hands of the Tarascans of Michoacan, on the west, and they wisely left these proud people alone for the rest of their history. To the east of the Valley was the Tlaxcallan state, hereditary enemies of the Aztecs; the Tlaxcallans were totally surrounded by Aztec armies, who eventually would have subdued them, but instead entered into a strange kind of pact called "The Flowery War," an agreement for perpetual hostilities which would guarantee a steady supply of sacrificial captives for both sides. |
| When it was bent on conquest, which was the case through much of Aztec history, the state could field very large armies and keep them supplied for long periods of time. Armies travel on their stomachs, and the Aztecs army was no exception; the staple ration on campaigns was toasted tortillas, produced in great quantities by their women at home.
Prowess and valor on the field of battle, demonstrated by the taking of captives for sacrifice in the capital, was rewarded with both social and economic advancement. |
| In his history of the New World, published in 1575, Benzoni comments sourly:
! 11 [ho fi-utto t a modo di mandorlc t & nafce in ur
Woodcut from Benzoni's 1565 La Historia del Mondo Nuovo, depicting a cacao tree and cacao beans spread out to dry; the artist has naively shown the pods growing from the tips of the branches, instead of the trunk.
It [chocolate] seemed more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity. |
| That the Spanish appetite for chocolate may have been at first biased towards the distaff side is confirmed by somewhat jaundiced remarks made by the Jesuit Jose de Acosta in his Natural and Moral history, published in 1590:
The main benefit of this cacao is a beverage which they make called Chocolate, which is a crazy thing valued in that country. It disgusts those who are not used to it, fot it has a foam on top, or a scum-like bubbling.... It is a valued drink which the Indians offer to the lords who come or pass through their land. |
Anne Harrington
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| In attempting a cultural history of mind-body medicine, I focus on stories because I believe this is the best way to carve the subject up at its joints. In mind-body medicine we are confronted not with an integrated vision or program but with a patchwork of approaches and understandings that pull in many different directions. Some approaches emphasize our power to heal ourselves. Others (particularly those highlighted by critics) emphasize our vulnerability to the psychological influences of others. Some are nostalgic for traditional forms of wisdom. |
| I first became aware of this years ago, when doing research on the history of hypnosis as part of some work for my dissertation. I remember sitting in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, books and old medical journals piled up on the table before me, and thinking, "I have no idea what to do, because it is clear that the understandings of hypnosis are not just changing over time. The mental and physiological experience of hypnosis—what it is—is changing too; and changing in ways that clearly reflect changing social expectations and mores. |
| None of my teachers had ever suggested to me that bodies might have culture too, that life inside our skins might have a history; but there was the evidence in the hypnosis literature at least, clear as could be.
The larger implications of this insight are worth spelling out in a little more detail. It is well known that human beings in general respond to the expectations of people around them, including and especially the expectations of the authority figures or experts. |
| Having taken some pains to clarify what I mean by stories and the roles they play in history, inside and outside the body, I want to make a further distinction between stories and something I will call "narratives." Stories are living, local, and specific. They are the things we read in books and newspapers, hear on the bus, tell over dinner, and use to guide behavior and experience. They refer to immediate, concrete events, people, scientific findings, and more. |
Devra Davis
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 THE SECRET history of the
WAR ON CANCER
"Those who want the future to be different from the past, must study the past"
-SPINOZA
My very good friend Andrea Martin lived through three bouts of breast cancer. She used to say, "The only way I will know I have really survived breast cancer is when I die of something else." She did: when she was fifty-six, a new and unrelated malignancy of the brain turned her into a breast cancer survivor.
Three years before a tangled web of glioblastoma multiforme invaded her brain, Andrea was in excellent health. |
Anne Harrington
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| The relevant history here begins in the world of early Viennese psychoanalytic practice, then moves to the battlefields of World War I and the veterans' hospitals of World War II. Our story also takes us into a comparative exploration of German-speaking and American psychosomatic medicine. The former was distinctly romantic, alternative, buoyed along by larger holistic cultural strains of the time, and then increasingly politicized as Germany succumbed to Nazism in the 1930s. |
Roberta Bivins
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 In combination with careful observation of each individual's demeanour, the patient's history could reveal any social and environmental factors relevant to disease.
By interpreting illness in terms of these more or less elaborate systems of correspondences, doctors added structure and analytical power to their empirical experience of disease. These three medical cosmologies also gave healers the intellectual tools they needed to recognize patterns, organize knowledge gained from experience, and render it more readily applicable. |
Devra Davis
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| Why, then, should we accept that there is no danger in being subjected to combinations of agents without precedent in human history? Biologist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California at Berkeley thinks the tadpoles of the seed-corn fields of York County, Nebraska, are trying to tell us something: one in every three exposed to mixtures of ordinary chemicals in those fields die.3
Everybody knows that cancer can run in families. Take the Stein-grabers of Illinois, the family of the lyrical environmental writer Sandra Steingraber, author of Living Downstream and Having Faith. |
| When two brothers from the same family with no known history of disease develop the same disorder of the blood and immune system, we have to ask, Is this just a coincidence? Is it some statistical fluke? Or did something happen to each of these men earlier in life to put them at risk of cancer? In thinking about their shared disease, Harvey was not surprised. He remembered the planes spraying clouds of pesticides overhead when the two brothers were growing up in Southern California. |
| An expert in photographic history advises me that they are snapshots taken with a common Kodak Brownie camera. They tell us nothing about the thoughts of the person taking them, other than that they were judged of sufficient import to capture on film and for Kehoe to keep them his entire life. |
Roberta Bivins
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| Temperate Seeds in Tropical Soils: Germ Theory in the Indian Medical Marketplace
William Osier remarked in 1905 that
The quarrels of doctors make a pretty chapter in the history of medicine. Each generation seems to have had its own. The Coans and Cnidians, the Arabians and the Galenists, the Brunonians and the Broussonians, the Homeopaths and the Regulars, have in different centuries, rent the robe of Aesculapius and of course the bald statement that 'doctors differ' is a truism applied to non-western and western practitioners alike. |
| It also sketched out Ayurvedic principles, organization, and models of the body; described the discoveries and innovations of Charaka and Susruta—and bemoaned Ayurveda's losses, its 'history of stagnation and decay' caused by religious scruples, invasions, and internal feuding, as losses to medicine as a whole.29 Articles following this format appeared sporadically in the medical press until the 1970s.
A 1964 Lancet editorial exemplifies another way in which information about Ayurveda came to the attention of the medical profession. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Surgery has a dark and dreadful history in the Western world, and the practice of operating on babies without anesthesia is just one footnote in a saga too terrifying to accurately describe. Its real history is hardly ever talked about today, just as doctors don't readily admit their profession once hawked cigarettes on television, proudly proclaiming Camels were, "Recommended by more doctors than any other cigarette!"
But the practice was real, and it was "standard operating procedure" at places like Oxford University and Boston Children's Hospital. It makes us all wonder, though... |
Roberta Bivins
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| The same interdependent processes of regulation and professionalization that dominated the nineteenth-century history of orthodox medicine are now under way in relation to many heterodox disciplines of healing?and for almost exactly the same reasons. The use of complementary, alternative, and cross-cultural medicines has become increasingly mainstream, and these therapeutic modalities are therefore much more visible and more profitable. One major US survey noted that both in 1990 and in 1997, consumers made more visits to 'alternative' practitioners than to all US primary care physicians. |
| His account of his experiences in the Far East, originally titled Amoenitatum Exoticarum ('Exotic Pleasures') and largely republished in vernacular as a history of Japan, was not a specifically medical text. Indeed, his descriptions of both moxabustion and acupuncture were offered only as appendices to the volume. They were certainly more attentive to the needs of a general audience than Ten Rhyne's accounts had been. |
Devra Davis
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| In the suppressed history he completed in 1977, Lester Breslow wrote,
The British just did not believe that Pap smears could be carried out by having non-physicians examine cells from the cervix. They felt that having samples leave a doctor's office meant that no reliable information could ever be developed. . . . This physician in British Columbia showed that these fee-for-service advocates were plain wrong. Screening for Pap smears could easily be done by non-doctors, so long as the laboratory was well qualified. |
Roberta Bivins
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| Kiu siu Kagami', two male figures illustrating acupuncture points, from Englebert Kaempfer, The history of Japan, 1728. Note the very westernized appearance of the human figures and the fact that the 'Japanese' characters which decorate the page are just that: decorations. They are not legible kanji (ideograms). Compare to Ten Rhyne's figures (Illustrations 11 and 12), which, although westernized, still accurately depict the acupuncture channels. moxa to produce particular therapeutic effects. However, he clearly found the opacity of the phenomenon's mechanism frustrating. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Its real history is hardly ever talked about today, just as doctors don't readily admit their profession once hawked cigarettes on television, proudly proclaiming Camels were, "Recommended by more doctors than any other cigarette!"
But the practice was real, and it was "standard operating procedure" at places like Oxford University and Boston Children's Hospital. It makes us all wonder, though... How could surgeons be so cruel as to operate on babies without anesthesia? |
Devra Davis
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| At the time these ads were published, the average person in America smoked 2,000 cigarettes a year. Those in Britain smoked a few less. In the decade from 1940 to 1950, U.S. tobacco consumption had more than doubled, and it would double again in the following decade. Lung cancer rates began to grow as well, making the connection tough to dispute. At first the industry dismissed the 1950 studies as irrelevant because they had looked back in time to figure out whether smoking played a role in deaths from cancer. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Experts say this is unlikely, as she had a bacterial lung infection rather than a viral one, and that she had no history of contact with birds.
Jan. 14, 2006 -- A 13-year-old Indonesian girl dies of bird flu, bringing the country's bird flu death toll to 13.
The girl's 5-year-old sister and 3-year-old brother are tested for bird flu, but results are inconclusive.
Jan. 15, 2006 -- Twelve-year-old Fatma Ozcan of Dogubayazit, Turkey, dies in hospital, but preliminary tests show she is negative for bird flu.
Jan. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Because the history of surgery in conventional medicine continues right up to this day, where countless barbaric procedures are still being formed, all in the name of "treating" patients. |
| The madness of surgery continues into modern times
The madness of conventional medicine and its surgical procedures, sadly, is not yet a closed chapter in the history books. We're still living it, and millions of Americans each year are being subjected to surgical procedures that can only be described as utterly mad, if not downright profitable for the masked men performing them: Hysterectomies, gastric bypass surgery, heart bypass surgery, carpal tunnel surgery, the surgical removal of wisdom teeth and many more.
None of these have any medical justification except in a few extreme cases. |
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