At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn's disease-a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for would be periods of remission. Unfortunately, doctors never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn's to consider how Western medicine's turn from an "art of healing" toward a "science of medicine" deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, medicine is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing's role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.

About the Author
Ed Cohen is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of A Body Worth Defending, also published by Duke University Press. He hosts a therapeutic practice for people interested in healing: healingcounsel.com.

Reviews
"An optimistic, ruminative appreciation for the art, the power, and the cultivation of human healing." * Kirkus Reviews *
"On Learning to Heal is affirming, informative, inviting, and accessible. It is revelatory in asking us -chronically ill people in particular-to view our ailing, aching bodies as miraculous in their capacity for healing. Equally fantastic is how it reveals to us the elitist, exclusionary, capital-led history behind belief systems that the medical industry has manufactured as blatant truths." -- Andrea Marks-Joseph * Independent Book Review *
"[A] probing critique . . . [I]ncisive and will win over those wary of the outre considerations of the role 'energy' plays in alternative healing. The searching questions raised are well worth considering." * Publishers Weekly *

"[Cohen's] story reminds us that words matter, and carefully phrased explanations can facilitate understanding and healing. His journey demonstrates the incredible power of a compassionate and open-minded clinician."

-- Franklin Berkley, DO * Family Medicine *
"Ed Cohen poses deeper challenges to biomedical thinking, urging his readers to critically consider what happens when the medical encounter becomes a scientific one, and what is thereby lost in terms of other possibilities for embodiment and healing." -- Elizabeth Bernstein * Public Books *
"Cohen recalls his harrowing, lifelong, and potentially soul-killing struggle with the vicious and capricious manifestations of a treatable, but incurable, intestinal affliction. In doing so, he casts a historical and philosophical perspective, both scholarly and intensely personal, on the meaning of healing beyond and within centuries of medical science, practice, and theory. He finds new ways to live and cultivate the vis medicatrix naturae (or healing power of nature) as distinct from and parallel to the treat-and-cure efforts of the physicians and hospitals that have ameliorated his symptoms and saved his life. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers."
* Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9781478019329
Author Ed Cohen
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 340g