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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
On Learning to Heal: Or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn's disease-a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn's to consider how Western medicine's turn from an "art of healing" toward a "science of medicine" deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing's role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
Book Details
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publish Date: Jan 3rd, 2023
- Pages: 240
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.51in - 0.72lb
- EAN: 9781478019329
- Categories: • Diseases & Conditions - General• Gender Studies• Psychotherapy - General
About the Author
Ed Cohen is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of A Body Worth Defending, also published by Duke University Press. He hosts a therapeutic practice for people interested in healing: healingcounsel.com.
Praise for this book
"An optimistic, ruminative appreciation for the art, the power, and the cultivation of human healing."-- "Kirkus Reviews" (1/13/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"On Learning to Heal is affirming, informative, inviting, and accessible. It is revelatory in asking us --chronically ill people in particular--to view our ailing, aching bodies as miraculous in their capacity for healing. Equally fantastic is how it reveals to us the elitist, exclusionary, capital-led history behind belief systems that the medical industry has manufactured as blatant truths."--Andrea Marks-Joseph "Independent Book Review" (1/18/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"[A] probing critique . . . [I]ncisive and will win over those wary of the outré considerations of the role 'energy' plays in alternative healing. The searching questions raised are well worth considering."-- "Publishers Weekly" (1/23/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"[Cohen's] story reminds us that words matter, and carefully phrased explanations can facilitate understanding and healing. His journey demonstrates the incredible power of a compassionate and open-minded clinician."
--Franklin Berkley, DO "Family Medicine" (8/1/2023 12:00:00 AM)"Ed Cohen poses deeper challenges to biomedical thinking, urging his readers to critically consider what happens when the medical encounter becomes a scientific one, and what is thereby lost in terms of other possibilities for embodiment and healing."--Elizabeth Bernstein "Public Books" (10/4/2023 12:00:00 AM)
"Cohen recalls his harrowing, lifelong, and potentially soul-killing struggle with the vicious and capricious manifestations of a treatable, but incurable, intestinal affliction. In doing so, he casts a historical and philosophical perspective, both scholarly and intensely personal, on the meaning of healing beyond and within centuries of medical science, practice, and theory. He finds new ways to live and cultivate the vis medicatrix naturae (or healing power of nature) as distinct from and parallel to the treat-and-cure efforts of the physicians and hospitals that have ameliorated his symptoms and saved his life. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers."
-- "Choice" (1/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
-- "Choice" (1/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
"Cohen's On Learning to Heal is also an excellent example of autotheory's affordances at the level of epistemology and methodology. The book seeks to foster practices of healing, practices about which, it convincingly argues, Western medicine, focused as it is on pathology, treatment, and cure, knows little."--Stephanie Clare "Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory" (7/29/2024 12:00:00 AM)