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Necessary Fictions: Healing Encounters with a North American Saint

Throughout the world for thousands of years the practice of medicine has been lodged in the context of mythopoetic world views. Medical practitioners could hardly be separated from magico-religious technicians of the "sacred." Nor was it possible to define the elaborate pharmacopeias or dietary remedies (some still used today) as a kind of primitive science, since religion, magic, and science were inseparably entwined in more or less homogeneous symbolic systems. Not until the emergence of state level societies, along with an expanding specialization of labor, and finally the Industrial Revolution, would medicine appear, at first glance, to have become detached from its magico-religious roots. This evolution in medical technology, with its consequent alienation of magico-religious sources of healing, has peaked today in overdeveloped Western technological societies. On the one hand, the historical rupture in the evolution of medicine wrenched it free from the shackles of "superstition"; on the other, it deepened the already nascent mind/body split embedded in Western civilization.