Swedenborg, Mesmer, and the Mind/body Connection

Résumé du livre

"From Emanuel Swedenborg to the New Age movement, Haller's thorough scholarship and incisive analysis ranges across a diverse historical landscape populated by visionaries, mystics, and idealist reformers who influenced some of the greatest minds of the past two centuries. . . . Approaching his subject with an honest objectivity and fairness that runs throughout, he has provided scholars and interested lay readers alike with a clear and engaging study of crucial intellectual currents that have navigated generations then and now toward new horizons and new worlds. This is an important book."

-- Michael A. Flannery, Professor and Associate Director for Historical Collections, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Complementary and alternative healing encompass a wide range of practices that share a common ground: the belief that our physical well-being is inextricably linked to an unseen world beyond our physical senses. Our view of that world can be traced to two key thinkers: Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Anton Mesmer.

Who were these men, and what shaped their thought? How did their ideas capture the public imagination? How did they speak to movements as diverse as utopianism, Spiritualism, psychic healing, and homeopathy? Historian John S. Haller traces the threads of Swedenborg's and Mesmer's influence through the history of nineteenth-century medicine, illuminating the lasting impact these men have had on concepts of alternative healing.