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Sign or symptom? Exceptional corporeal phenomena in religion and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Edited by Tine Van Osselaer, Henk de Smaele and Kaat Wils. Pp.205 incl. 23 ills and 1 table. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017. €45 (paper). 978 94 6270 107 6

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Sign or symptom? Exceptional corporeal phenomena in religion and medicine in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Edited by Tine Van Osselaer, Henk de Smaele and Kaat Wils. Pp.205 incl. 23 ills and 1 table. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2017. €45 (paper). 978 94 6270 107 6

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 July 2018

James C. Ungureanu*
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
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Abstract

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

This little volume attempts to examine the ‘cross-overs and collaborations’ between science and religion. Its contributors focus on the production and circulation of knowledge of unusual bodily phenomena by medical and religious authorities over a period ranging from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and from within French, English, Portuguese, Austrian and Belgian contexts. The editors, however, overstate the case when they insist that this productive relationship has been ‘hidden from view until now’. Nevertheless, its central claim is correct: medical and religious epistemologies did not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. Indeed, religious authorities often adopted new medical practices and methods to test the testimony of visionaries, and whether their extraordinary bodily manifestations supported divine intervention. The volume is a curious compendium of local events. One essay, for instance, examines the treatment of religious pathologies in an early nineteenth-century Tyrolean institute. Doctors and chaplains are shown together negotiating the therapeutic process, where a combination of medicine and religious practice defined what was healthy and unhealthy religious belief. Another essay looks at how the positivist Jean-Marie Charcot, the Catholic doctor Gustave Boissarie and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud responded to ‘exceptional corporeal phenomena’ such as convulsions, visions, seizures and paralysis in terms of religious development. There are also essays exploring how certain female lay mystics were invested with political and religious meaning: one became a symbolic figure of French royalists; another was condemned as irrational and heretical by the Roman Catholic Church, which at the time was seeking to protect its reputation in an increasingly secular-minded world. Another essay discusses the lack of extraordinary mystical phenomena in modern American Catholicism, and how such Catholics came to reject mystical phenomena to avoid the stigma of superstition. Mystical manifestations were thus taken either as a ‘sign’ of supernatural favour or as a ‘symptom’ of neurological disorder by both scientist and theologian. An interesting piece follows on how Moroccan Islamic mystics were pathologised and even incarcerated by French physicians and sociologists in asylums in North Africa. While these case studies offer a local context, most of the material is derivative from more scholarly and wide-ranging studies. Moreover, there is very little engagement, if any, with secondary literature, particularly from English and North American historians of science and medicine. The complicated relationship between science and religion has been discussed by a host of scholars for over fifty years, and it is flatly puzzling to read that this relationship has been ‘hidden from view until now’. In total, this collection of essays can be commended for its admirable approach, but the historian of science may ultimately pass it over as it will likely frustrate more than illuminate.