The Healers

Physicians, Spiritualists, and Shamans in the Search for Holistic Health

March 15, 2025

The Healers: Physicians, Spiritualists, and Shamans in the Search for Holistic Health is a fascinating study of mankind’s attempts to heal disease and alleviate suffering. Since antiquity there has bee an abiding interest in the interplay of body and spirit in resolution of illness. Within the mysteries of the human body has been an undeniable but invisible and intangible force that somehow influences the fate of nature’s wiles on health and disease. While, eventually, science explained many of the nuances of illness, there remained, even to this day, the mysterious authority of an as yet undiscoverable, unexplainable, metaphysical or even supernatural component to health. The stories span ancient times to the present; from the healing sects of Asclepius to the inspirations of Christianity to rudimentary quasi-science of medieval and early modern eras to paranormal shamans, like the Lakota healer Black Elk, to the humanitarian wisdom of near-contemporary practitioners such as William Osler. To greater and lesser degrees, all attempted some integration of the scientific and spiritual; of the measurable and undefined; of the seen and unseen. It became a pursuit of holistic healing – the blending of mind and body in resolution of sickness. Both had an indispensable role for the sufferer – whether in cure or in the anguishing journey to death. The enlightened physicians of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, those visionaries like the contemplative Alexis Carrel or the holy man Joseph De Veuster (better known as Damian of Moloka’i) or troubled psychiatrist Sabina Spielrein aimed for the proper balance of physical and metaphysical in their penetrating approaches to holistic mending. All have realized, though, whether shamans or scholars, the rich traditions, beliefs, and hopes that resides in the human soul which may aid or detract from the workings of scientific methodology, enough so that reconciliation and resignation is possible in the face of horrible disease and illness. After all, it is the indominable human spirit that must prevail even after the delicate machinery of the body has failed. Lessons are there for the taking – even now – whether from the otherworldly rituals of the god-man Asclepius or the wilderness contemplations of Black Elk or the thoughtful compassion of Harvard educated Edward Churchill.