The following review will appear in the September 2010 issue of CHOICE Magazine.

Paralleling the rise of modern scientific medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe and North America have seen the development of alternative traditions of healing and medicine from beyond the physical world. John S. Haller (emer., Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale) traces the modern origins of these parallel traditions to two figures, Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer. These alternative traditions of healing predicate the ability of humans to draw on and benefit from forces of energy largely invisible to the physical senses, but, it is claimed, vital to human health and well-being. Swedenborg and Mesmer differed in their own systems of understanding these forces and how one might draw on them, but they shared a common conviction that the key to health and happiness lay in the proper management of these forces. Haller draws a broad picture of the major 19th-century incarnations of these traditions, such as mesmerism, perfectionism, Owenism and various Utopian movements, spiritualism, Christian Science, Theosophy, New Thought, and many others, with a brief attempt at the end to touch on recent New Age movements. 

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.

—M. A. Granquist, Luther Seminary 5