Emotion

Emotion was “one of medical orthodoxy’s most important concepts for defining and negotiating its relationship with alternative modes of healing and with its own history . . . orthodox physicians . . . developed new concepts and new rhetorical strategies in rationalizing away the apparent successes of alternative systems: the emphasis on the body’s natural healing powers, the promulgation of the notion of ‘self-limiting’ diseases, and the formulation of a theory of placebo – all were mechanisms that explained alternative knowledge claims in terms of orthodox theory. . . .The central mechanism that allowed psychosomatic clinicians to mediate between orthodoxy and the occult was emotion. Emotion explained millennia of apparent premodern medical successes, naturalized the power of the occult, and marshaled these naturalized powers – in the form of emotion – for orthodox medicine” (Dror, 77-78).