History of Medicine contd: Dossey's ERAs of Medicine

Last post on this blog I wrote about Eric Cassell and Leslie Weatherhead, both active in the 1900s in trying to educate the medical profession towards a greater “healing” ethos in medical practice.

When I started researching for my book on the Wounded Healer (Healing This Wounded Earth) information on Weatherhead was not so easy to come by and I had to satisfy myself with a very old secondhand copy of the revised 1955 version of his thesis, which I treasure as being an important influence from which much of my early research progressed. It is surely a positive sign of change in our attitudes towards spirituality and a resurgence of interest in the links between spirituality and medicine that Weatherhead’s thesis has been made available again as a reprint in 2008.

And now, forty years after Weatherhead, we have Larry Dossey who has looked back on what he saw as a new era in medicine from the 1950s, but said that the then prevailing study of the mind/body question within medicine would be more accurately described as the brain/body question to reflect the widespread scientific attitude of the time. This was the medicine of physicians such as Eric Cassell, a phase that Dossey calls ERA II in the development of medicine to follow on from the first 100 years or so of what he called mechanical medicine which he identified as ERA I.

Like Weatherhead,
Dossey foresaw and hoped for the start of a new era, ERA III, when the importance of the soul would properly be recognized and even the field of ‘non local’ approaches to healing, such as prayer, would also be seen as a respectable further therapy within mainstream medicine (1)
Dossey of course continues to expand on and develop this theme to this day although there is a long way to go in gaining wider acceptance of these views.
Weatherhead was not only a renowned preacher who regularly packed the church with up to 1000 people who came just to hear him. He was also a true visionary, with ideas ahead of his time, exploring as he did the mind/body aspects of healthcare within the spiritual paradigm. At the time those who supported such ideas must have felt like voices lost in the wilderness of the inexorable march of scientific progress and medical positivism. To an extent we still do!!

References:

(1) Dossey, Larry, Healing Words - The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine New York: Harper Collins Publishers 1993, p. xv Preface and p.44. This is one of his early books.

Healing and Curing: Eric Cassell and Leslie Weatherhead

A brief recap on posts to date may be a good idea here: I am fascinated by the movement to bring the treatment of the mind, soul and spirit back into mainstream Western medicine. I yearn for a wider recognition that technology and pharmacology cannot provide all the answers where wellbeing and healthcare are concerned. Over the last week or so and for the next few weeks in this blog I am tracing the history of Western medicine, showing where we lost sight of our souls in our treatments and then offering signs of hope all around us for those who are looking for healing for our dis-ease as well as cures for our illness.

I really don’t want to imply that during the 1900s there were no physicians who understood the importance in their work of a sympathetic interaction, a sensitivity of feeling between the doctor and the patient. One notable American physician, Eric J. Cassell, had a mission in the 1970s
to help physicians understand the difference between curing and healing in the relief of suffering.
Cassell wrote a great deal about the need to combine the practice of medicine as a science with the need to address the overall illness of the patient, the need for the patient to be made whole, the need to address all the other complex interrelated factors affecting the patient’s overall well being and the all important need, the ultimate purpose of all medicine, to relieve the patient’s suffering. He developed this theme in many books throughout his career and by the 1990s was still lamenting that in his view modern medicine was generally still failing to relieve suffering. Throughout his working life Cassell has emphasized that mind, body and soul or spirit are one and cannot be viewed in isolation.

Then there was the extremely popular, if sometimes controversial, English Methodist Minister and legendary preacher Leslie D. Weatherhead  in London in the 1950s, who wrote an important thesis on the links between psychology, religion and healing. This was a subject that had come to intrigue him immensely. In this thesis he wrote eloquently and in detail of
a perceived new era in medicine, when faith and soul would again be widely recognized as a vital part of the mainstream medical practice. 
He saw the limitations of the average medical doctor, in terms of time constraints and training, for healing more than the physiological body. In relation to patients for whom he thought the illness was rooted in the mind or the soul, he wrote:

‘the ordinary doctor is usually of little use in such cases. He tends to interpret physical symptoms only in terms of physical origins. He works on what I have described as the ‘garage level’. He is skilled to repair the machine. It is no disparagement of the general practitioner to say that he has not the time or, often, the skill, to interpret physical symptoms in terms of psychological, let alone spiritual, disharmony. If he had, in the latter case at least, he usually would not know what to do about it.’(1)

Seeing the potential for using the combined skills of the psychologist, doctor and pastor in the healing process, by 1935 Weatherhead had established the City Temple Psychological Clinic in the heart of London, where these principles were successfully put into practice (2). Weatherhead wrote extensively of the spiritual and religious aspects of medicine as foreseen in Jung’s work. Although certainly controversial in his preaching and healing, he was also widely regarded and respected for much of his work and insight. But he was of course trying to reintroduce the soul into mainline medical practice in the broadly secular climate of that time and his work failed to capture the combined and co-operative imaginations of the public, the pastor and the doctor. After his death in 1976 Weatherhead seemed to all but disappear from public awareness and his thesis of the integration of psychology, religion and healing was largely forgotten, or so it seemed, in the continuing inexorable march of scientific knowledge.... to be contd.

References:

(1) Weatherhead, Leslie D, Psychology Religion and Healing, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1951, reprinted with further revision 1955, p. 482. There is a new edition published by Stewart Press: 2008.

(2) Weatherhead led the City Temple church from 1936-1960. There is a Healing and Counseling Centre at St Marylebone Parish Church opened 1987 combining innovative health care through an NHS doctor’s surgery offering many complementary therapies

The Nurse as Wounded Healer - Empathy in healthcare

We have a popular saying in the UK. If something happens in the United States, be sure it will soon come over to us in the UK! We often say this of snow storms and gales, (usually accurately), but this adage also applies to many other cultural ideas and issues. There today, here tomorrow.
Therefore I was absolutely fascinated to hear on our BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday that Huddersfield University has created a Compassion in Care doctoral scholarship research post. The first to take up this post is Barbara Schofield, a consultant nurse for older people in the Calderdale and Huddersfield National Health Service Trust.  She will study dignity and compassion in care and whether it can be taught to student nurses.
When I was researching and writing about the need for compassion and empathy in health care, I was impressed by the green shoots of a more holistic medicine visible in the US, that could be held up as an example for the UK, where acceptance of compassion and empathy training in the healing process seems rare, and mostly confined to pediatric and cancer care. Such a holistic approach had been advocated for example by Eric Cassell, who has written much about the need for healing as well as curing, and Larry Dossey, Norman Shealy and Dawson Church, to name a few, who recognize the need for a more holistic style of soul medicine to complement the traditional and more technologically driven current health care. But there is still a long way to go here, even in the United States.
Recently the UK's health Ombudsman has written a damning report, that the UK National Health Service was failing to respond to the needs of older people, and citing some disturbing instances of neglect of the elderly. Schofield clearly has plenty to get her teeth into, and I would recommend first that she reads Marion Conti- O'Hare's excellent book on The Nurse as Wounded Healer; from Trauma to Transcendence, and looks at her Q.U.E.S.T model for transcending trauma. But I also find O'Hare work interesting for her recognition, albeit in a fairly low key way in the book, that the work of the Wounded Healer in holistically healing our patients has a wider social significance in healing the social ills of our world. 
I think Barbara Schofield has a fascinating few years of research ahead of her.