Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection (CB) the Roots of Complementary Medicine: The Roots of Complementary Medicine (Swedenborg Studies, 19, Band 19) - Hardcover

John S. Haller Jr.,emeritus professor of history and medical humanities at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, has written a dozen books on subjects including race, sexuality, and the history of medicine. He is former editor of Caduceus: A Humanities Journal for Medicine and the Health Sciences and, until his retirement at the end of 2008, served for eighteen years as vice president for academic affairs for the Southern Illinois University system.

Healing practices as diverse as homeopathy, chiropractic, and therapeutic touch draw their inspiration and effectiveness from an unseen world beyond the physical senses. Our view of that world is the legacy of two key thinkers: Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer.

The starting point is the competing worldviews of Swedenborg, a mystic whose deep faith in God and visions of the afterlife have moved generations, and Mesmer, whose magnetic healing system required nothing but the forces of nature. Both were convinced that good health depended on properly managing one’s internal energies, whether that meant a life of biblical virtue or simply achieving balance with the universe. This book traces the influence of these two men through the nineteenth century as their ideas were embraced by utopians, psychic healers, spiritualists, mind-cure advocates, homeopaths, and ultimately by the inheritors of those traditions—modern practitioners of alternative healing.

Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection illuminates a pivotal time in American history, when pioneers explored not only the boundaries of their growing nation, but the limits—and the intersection—of mind and spirit.

Healing practices as diverse as homeopathy, chiropractic, and therapeutic touch draw their inspiration and effectiveness from an unseen world beyond the physical senses. Our view of that world is the legacy of two key thinkers: Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer.

The starting point is the competing worldviews of Swedenborg, a mystic whose deep faith in God and visions of the afterlife have moved generations, and Mesmer, whose magnetic healing system required nothing but the forces of nature. Both were convinced that good health depended on properly managing one s internal energies, whether that meant a life of biblical virtue or simply achieving balance with the universe. This book traces the influence of these two men through the nineteenth century as their ideas were embraced by utopians, psychic healers, spiritualists, mind-cure advocates, homeopaths, and ultimately by the inheritors of those traditions modern practitioners of alternative healing.

Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/Body Connection illuminates a pivotal time in American history, when pioneers explored not only the boundaries of their growing nation, but the limits and the intersection of mind and spirit.

A short step in any direction from Western science’s reductionist approach to knowledge is a meditative world that includes ghosts, demons, angels, saints, divinely inspired dreams, remote viewing, electromagnetic fields, distant healing, and a host of psychic phenomena and occult activities that defy the epistemological tools of “normal” science. Starting with the Kabbalah in Jewish mysticism and continuing through the apocalyptic literature of the pre-Christian era, Gnostic cosmology, and German pietism, to name but a few, there have been centuries of challenges to conventional thinking regarding mind-matter interaction that operates beyond the ordinary senses. As a generally accepted theory of knowing, this meditative world first fell in arrears as Baconian empiricism cast a long shadow over the acceptance of paranormal events. Hastened along by Descartes’s view of life as automata, the emergence of the empirical sciences during the Enlightenment, the mechanical triumphs of the Industrial Revolution, and later by Darwin’s dysteleology, this rationalist worldview found itself challenged by a universe whose existence and complexity demanded neither a designer nor a purpose. The product of chance, Earth plied the ether with blind indifference to the thoughts, hopes, and feelings of its myriad of creatures. Yet “God,” “immortality,” “duty,” and “judgment” were earnestly sought by those who objected to the cold indifference of the night sky. From Emanuel Swedenborg’s visions and Franz Anton Mesmer’s magnetic fluid to Walter J. Kilner’s human auras, Ralph Waldo Trine’s thought forms, Charles W. Leadbeater’s chakras, and Barbara Brennan’s High Sense Perception, a more mystical worldview remains an integral part of mankind’s perceptual set.