Abstract
The history of religion can barely be separated from that of health. Most, if not all, religions are bound up with some comprehensive conception of health and well-being, whether cast in cyclical or linear patterns of redemption, salvation, or fullness of life. Health, here, means more than medicine.1 However, even the term “medicine” has a deeper meaning than most realize, with surprising etymological origins in the pharaonic language of Egypt: the mediation (medi) of the healer (sine).2
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Notes
David R. Kinsley, Health, Healing and Religion: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995).
The French Annales school coined the historical concept of the longue durée prioritizing “long-term” historical structures and mentalities over events, and emphasizing a history from below; see Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History and Other Essays, trans. Peter Burke and K. Folca (New York: Harper & Row (Harper Torchbooks), 1973).
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Ibid., 81–87; George Rosen, A History of Public Health (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 263–66.
Lancet, June 23, 1855, cited in Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic-and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2006), 186.
Or perhaps eighty-nine, as reported by S. P. W. Chave, “Henry Whitehead and Cholera in Broad Street,” Medical History 2, no. 2 (1958): 92.
Henry Whitehead, “Report on the Cholera Outbreak in the Parish of St. James, Westminster, During the Autumn of 1854,” http://johnsnow.matrix.msu.edu/work, accessed August 10, 2009, (1855), 132.
Vivian Nutton, “The Medical Meeting Place,” in Ancient Medicine in Its Socio-Cultural Context, Volume 1, ed. Ph. J. van der Eijk, H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, and P. H. Schrijvers, The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995).
Bronwen L. Wickkiser, Asklepios, Medicine, and the Politics of Healing in Fifth-Century Greece: Between Craft and Cult (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
Peter van Minnen, “Medical Care in Late Antiquity,” in Ancient Medicine in Its Socio-Cultural Context, Volume 1, ed. Ph. J. van der Eijk, H. F. J. Horstmanshoff, and P. H. Schrijvers, The Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), 154. See also
Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, “Charity and Aid in Medieval Christian Civilization,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 182.
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See James C. McGilvray, The Quest for Health and Wholeness (Tübingen: German Institute for Medical Mission, 1981), 2–3.
Christoffer H. Grundmann, Sent to Heal!: Emergence and Development of Medical Missions (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005).
See, for example, the chapter on missions in James R. Cochrane, Servants of Power: The Role of English-Speaking Churches, 1903–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987). Albert Schweitzer represents a classic example of the ambiguities in medical mission approaches: clearly holding a patriarchal view on Africans, he also felt a deep responsibility to atone for what he describes as the unbearable injustice and cruelty done to African people by European colonizers. See Albert Schweitzer, Zwischen Wasser und Urwald: Erlebnisse und Beobachtungen
See Andrew M. Eason, “All Things to All People to Save Some’: Salvation Army Missionary Work Among the Zulus of Victorian Natal,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35, no. 1 (2009): 8.
For a brief summary of some of these factors, see Christoffer H. Grundmann, “Mission and Healing in Historical Perspective,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 32, no. 4 (2008): 187.
For example, see Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (Toronto: Bantam, 1979).
Gillian Paterson, “The CMC story, 1968–1998,” Contact 161/162 (1998): 3–52.
John H. Bryant, Health and the Developing World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).
James C. McGilvray, “The Church and Health: Reflections and Possibilities,” Contact 81 (October 1984): 7.
Peter Bellamy, “The Significance of Bob Lambourne’s Writing Today,” Contact 81 (1984): 12–15.
Robert A. Lambourne, “Secular and Christian Models of Health and Salvation,” Contact 1 (1970): 2.
John H. Bryant, “Five Challenges to the Churches in Health Work,” Contact 42 (1977): 1.
J. H. Bryant and David Jenkins, “Moral Issues and Health Care,” Contact 4 (July 1971): 11.
See Marcos Cueto, “The Origins of Primary Health Care and Selective Primary Health Care,” American Journal of Public Health 94, no. 11 (2004): 1865. While groundbreaking at the time, this approach did not survive well: “The percentage of villages with a cooperative medical system fell from 90% in the 1960s to 5% by 1985. …. [The] Collapse of the cooperative medical system and change in the role of barefoot doctors resulted in a huge decline in primary health-care coverage in rural areas,” according to
Daqing Zhang and Paul U. Unschuld, “China’s Barefoot Doctor: Past, Present, and Future,” The Lancet 372, no. 9653 (2008): 1865–67. More recent reforms have tried to reverse this situation; see Guy Carrin et al., “The Reform ofthe Rural Cooperative Medical System in the People’s Republic of China: Interim Experience in 14 Pilot Counties,” Social Science & Medicine 48, no. 7 (1999): 961–67.
World Health Organization, Health by the People (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1975).
See, for example, Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern Society, The Britannica Perspectives (New York: New American Library, 1968);
Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic, 1980).
Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
William H. Foege, J. D. Millar, and D. A. Henderson, “Smallpox Eradication in West and Central Africa,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 52, no. 2 (1975): 209.
William H. Foege, “Keynote Speech, the Thomas Francis Jr. Medal in Global Public Health,” University of Michigan, www.polio.umich.edu/program/foege.html, accessed October 26, 2010. See also a recent comparison of smallpox and polio vaccination campaigns in India, by
S. Bhattacharya and R. Dasgupta, “A Tale of Two Global Health Programs: Smallpox Eradication’s Lessons for the Antipolio Campaign in India,” American Journal of Public Health 99, no. 7 (2009): 1176–84.
“Herd immunity” was the standard approach of the time, which Foege and his colleagues discarded to initiate their surveillance-containment model; see, William H. Foege, “Smallpox Eradication: William Foege Oral History-Interviewed by Victoria Harden,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.globalhealthchronicles.org/smallpox/record/view/pid/emory:l5jvg, accessed October 26, 2010. That this model was key to their success is challenged by Edward H. Kaplan and Lawrence M. Wein, “Smallpox Eradication in West and Central Africa: Surveillance-Containment or Herd Immunity?” Epidemiology 14, no. 1 (2003): 90–92. And, in response, it is vehemently defended by Svetlana S. Marennikova, “Commentary: Perspectives on Smallpox Eradication,” Epidemiology 14, no. 1 (2003): 93.
Much of the following narrative is drawn from Billy Woodward, Joel Shurkin, and Debra Gordon, Scientists Greater Than Einstein: The Biggest Lifesavers of the Twentieth Century (Fresno, CA: Linden Publishing, 2009).
William H. Foege, Donald Millar, and J. Michael Lane, “Selective Epidemiologic Control in Smallpox Eradication,” American Journal of Epidemiology 94, no. 4 (1971): 311.
World Bank, World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
John J. Hall and Richard Taylor, “Health for All Beyond 2000: The Demise of the Alma-Ata Declaration and Primary Health Care in Developing Countries,” Medical Journal of Australia 178 (2003): 20.
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003);
Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (New York: Hyperion, 2000);
Jim Yong Kim et al., eds., Dying for Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
Lucy Gilson et al., “Challenging Inequity through Health Systems,” (Geneva: WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health, 2007);
Richard Hofrichter, ed., Health and Social Justice: Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass [John Wiley & Sons], 2003);
Nancy Krieger, “Why Epidemiologists Cannot Afford to Ignore Poverty,” Epidemiology 18 (2007): 658–63.
World Health Organization, The World Health Report 2008: Primary Health Care-Now More than Ever (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2008).
World Health Organization, Building from Common Foundations: The World Health Organization and Faith-Based Organizations in Primary Healthcare (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2008).
Robert W. Amler and H. Bruce Dull, eds., Closing the Gap: The Burden of Unnecessary Illness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), vii, Preface.
Gary R. Gunderson, “The Task Ahead,” in Faith and Health (Atlanta, GA: Interfaith Health Program, The Carter Center, 1994), 1.
Miriam Kiser, Deborah L. Jones, and Gary R. Gunderson, “Faith and Health: Leadership Aligning Assets to Transform Communities,” International Review of Mission 95, no. 376/377 (2006): 50.
Thomas A. Droege, “Congregations as Communities of Health and Healing,” Interpretation 69, no. 2 (1995): 118.
For one account of ARHAP, see James R. Cochrane, “A Model of Integral Development: Assessing and Working with Religious Health Assets,” in Religion and Development: Ways of Transforming the World, ed. Gerrieter Haar (London; New York: Hurst & Co; Columbia University Press, 2011).
African Religious Health Assets Programme, “Appreciating Assets: The Contribution of Religion to Universal Access in Africa” (Cape Town: ARHAP, Report for the World Health Organization, 2006).
See Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do about It (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009).
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© 2012 Gary R. Gunderson and James R. Cochrane
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Gunderson, G.R., Cochrane, J.R. (2012). The Health of the Public and the Religious Mind: Connections and Disconnections. In: Religion and the Health of the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_2
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