Rhetoric Of Healing Research Articles

Jurema In Contemporary Brazil: Ritual Re‐Actualizations, Mysticism, Consciousness, And Healing

AbstractThis article proposes an exposition and analysis of perceptions intrinsic to rituals carried out with the use of the jurema plant, especially when mixed with Syrian rue (juremahuasca) in contexts of contemporary esoteric re‐actualizations in Brazil. These rituals are conducted by people who look at jurema as a spiritual path, once acquainted with its psychedelic properties. We highlight the mystical attributes and the cultural bricolage elaborated by these individuals, who conduct ceremonies in ritual spaces in which participants experience altered states of perception and consciousness. Considered as an entheogen, jurema leads to states of mystical transformation in people. Such personal changes are often considered by users as the rhetoric of healing. Life stories and ethnographic contexts form the background of the article, which seeks to advance understandings about jurema based on speculations around the intertwining of the themes of consciousness, mysticism, and healing.

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Kirsten Twelbeck, "Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882" (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018), 438 pp.

Making a Drama out of a Crisis

The Prince of Medicine: Galen in the Roman Empire Susan P Mattern Oxford University Press, 2013 HB, 368pp, £15.00, 978-0199605453 Although Galen of Pergamum (129–ca. 216) never left enough personal information to constitute a biography in the modern sense, he was a figure famous enough in his native city, with its Great Altar of Zeus (reconstructed in modern Berlin), as well as in the imperial capital Rome, for his passage to have been remarked on. While he may not have written much about himself he was a prolific author, with a corpus ‘making up one-eighth of all the classical Greek literature that survives.’ So famous was he as a physician that he was associated in Arab legends with that other charismatic healer, Jesus of Nazareth. Susan Mattern has already written about the role of the physician in second-century Graeco-Roman society in Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. Her latest book examines the character of the man who was to be the last word in medicine for over a millennium. A rather mysterious, driven, arrogant, and vainglorious figure emerges. Galen himself suffered from a recurrent abdominal illness in his twenties and recovered from it completely aged 27, a cure he attributed to the intervention of the god Asclepius. …

Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films

AbstractThe unparalleled commercial sucessess that gospel-playwright-turned-screenwriter Tyler Perry has attained through converting his stage plays into films that depict black women overcoming personal crises raises questions about the intent behind his seemingly feminist-inspired representations of black womanhood. Through an analysis of the rhetoric of healing in Perry’s first two films, this essay reveals one of the suppressive pedagogical functions of Perry’s representation of black womanhood. Rhetorics of healing are a series of persuasive messages, performances, and literacy acts that writers deploy in order to convince readers that redressing or preventing crises requires them to follow the curriculum for ideological, communicative, and behavioral transformation that the writer considers essential to wellness. In Diary of a Mad Black Woman and Madea’s Family Reunion, Perry’s representation of rhetorical healing constructs black Christian women as students who must learn prescribed attitudes and b...

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Reading Roman knowledge

Galen is currently being rediscovered. Under the management of Philip van der Eijk, a massive project has begun to translate into English much of the output of this hugely prolific figure, who dominated both European and Arabic medicine for over a millennium: his surviving treatises alone add up to around three million words. For many of these works, it will be the first time they have been translated into any modern language. The most recent monograph on Galen, Susan Mattern’s Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Johns Hopkins 2008), focuses on his narratives of particular cases and raises interesting questions about the power relationship between the physician and his elite patients, for whom he may have performed essentially servile tasks of basic bodily care. The 2008 Cambridge Companion to Galen edited by Jim Hankinson has five contributors in common with the present collection, but focuses on the philosophy of Galen. So what is new in this collection? It must be the sheer range of approaches to, and understandings of, Galen. While Galen as philosopher is not neglected, in Galen and the World of Knowledge he is presented as reader, synthesiser, lexicographer, philologist, collector, traveller, performer, commentator, critic, theorist and—rather less centrally here—as practising physician. The introduction underlines the point that Galen is both representative of the thought patterns and social life of the elite, and yet entirely unrepresentative. This is picked up by Hankinson in particular; Galen’s training was exceptional, both lengthy and expensive, and his medicine is very much for the elite, so his success ‘‘is at least as much social as it is medical— and he obviously revels in this fact’’ (p. 239). The chapters therefore locate him in the Greco-Roman intellectual world of what Vivian Nutton calls here the ‘‘Antonine man of letters’’ (p. 33), while showing his unique contributions. The project originates in a conference held at Exeter in 2005, so it can take into account the discovery in that year, in the Vlatadon monastery in Thessalonica, of Galen’s

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing by Susan P. Mattern

462 PHOENIX Wallace-Hadrill is not the first to suggest that his Foucauldian project of 1997 might be expanded into the realm of governance, but the actualization of that effort in Chapter Six, "Knowing the City," is nicely done, and generously gives credit to the foundational work in this arena of Coarelli, Nicolet, and Rodriguez-Almeida. Rome's Cultural Revolution is a long, rich and complex book, partially, at least, at odds with itself. Not only are the varied strands of argument incompletely integrated, some seem to me distinctly weaker than others. Nonetheless, I should like to emphasize once again in closing the very notable achievement of Parts III and IV. The detailed studies there undertaken, of plans of Rome before the Severan marble plan, say, or of pottery lamps, are splendid and exciting. What is more, by assimilating his project to that of Rostovtzeff, Wallace-Hadrill does more than revive the dormant question, now nearly a century old, of the utility of concepts like "bourgeoisie" to Rome. He forcefully demonstrates the insights to be gleaned from the renewed application of class- and cultural-materialist frameworks to the study of domestic material culture and decorative arts. What is more, by setting that history alongside the gradual evacuation of meaning from purely juridical notions of belonging—by pointing, that is, to changes in the meaning of citizenship attendant upon the loss of its great privileges—Wallace-Hadrill points emphatically to an answer. A commercial class did in fact rise on the back of empire in the second century B.C.E.; and whether it willed it or not, it was effectively depoliticized in the narrow sense of the term by the material effects of diaspora and the constitutional effects of monarchy. But that latter process only further consolidated the coming-to-be of notions of identity and systems of social differentiation based on consumption, taste, and display. University of Chicago Clifford Ando Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing. By Susan P. Mattern. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2008. Pp. viii, 279. Susan Mattern's contribution to the ever-growing scholarship on Galen is worthy of commendation. In a field which is rapidly expanded, Mattern's work continues to drive home the message that scholars of many disciplines must contend with Gailen.1 Not only do the more than 20,000 pages of text preserve important medical and philosophical information, but a surprising amount of material regarding second-century Roman society is contained within the corpus as well. Mattern embarks on a study of Galen's representation of his patients as recorded in case-history narratives; it is a welcome addition to the scholarship which addresses the interplay between medicine and social culture. Mattern is well-informed about the major socio-cultural issues of Rome, Galenic scholarship, and the writings of Galen himself. She is rightly insistent on placing Galen's medical activity within its social context, stating that "It is one of the purposes of this book to illuminate the relationship between Galen's stories and the society that produces them"(49). Putting aside an interest in medicine, the author instead focuses entirely on "the social world around the sick person" (89). She attempts to reveal the reality of Galen's Rome and to determine the lens through which he viewed it by closely analyzing his narratives. Her intent is to determine to what extent Galen's accounts of his patients may 1 Extensive up-to-date bibliography can be found in: R. J. Hankinson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galen (Cambridge 2008). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 463 be used as a source of information, not only of Galen's activities, but also of the functioning of the world in which the patients lived, together with their family and friends as well as Galen's associates. She is aware of the pitfalls of the project and correctly reminds the reader that "we read Galen's representation of the history and not, of course, the patient's original story" (125). The book is divided into five substantial chapters, with a sixth serving as a brief conclusion. Two appendices, a section of notes, a bibliography, and an index comprise nearly half of...

Galen and the rhetoric of healing

Galen is the most important physician of the Roman imperial era. Many of his theories and practices were the basis for medical knowledge for centuries after his death and some practices-like checking a patient's pulse-are still used today. He also left a vast corpus of writings which makes up a full one-eighth of all surviving ancient Greek literature. Through her readings of hundreds of Galen's case histories, Susan P. Mattern presents the first systematic investigation of Galen's clinical practice. Galen's patient narratives illuminate fascinating interplay among the craft of healing, social class, professional competition, ethnicity, and gender. Mattern describes the public, competitive, and masculine nature of medicine among the urban elite and analyzes the relationship between clinical practice and power in the Roman household. She also finds that although Galen is usually perceived as self-absorbed and self-promoting, his writings reveal him as sensitive to the patient's history, symptoms, perceptions, and even words. Examining his professional interactions in the context of the world in which he lived and practiced, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing provides a fresh perspective on a foundational figure in medicine and valuable insight into how doctors thought about their patients and their practice in the ancient world.

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (review)

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing

Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing

"Forty acres of cotton waiting to be picked": medical students, storytelling, and the rhetoric of healing.

"'Forty acres of cotton waiting to be picked': Medical Students, Storytelling, and the Rhetoric of Healing," divides medical students' stories into four categories, including stories focusing on 1) factual matters of medical practice; 2) identity; 3) underlying assumptions of medical practice; and 4) the nature of healing. Through their stories, medical students negotiate the difficulties of medical school and move toward an understanding of healing rooted as deeply in language and its rhetorical acts as in the biomedical sciences.