Healing Traditions

Undergraduate / Graduate

This seminar is a comparative exploration of medical and healing traditions and their religious, spiritual, and cultural intersections. Students will gain an understanding of the history of medicine in the Middle East, India, China, and the West, including the metaphysical systems that inform those traditions. Within the frameworks of Islamic Medicine, i.e. "prophetic medicine" and Sufi healing practices, Avicenna and the Galenic tradition, Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda and Buddhist medicine, we will discuss the following topics: Ritual healing, faith and prayer, divine healers and medical authority, etiology and pathology, religious pharmacology and drugs, mental health, spiritual states and possession, and near death experiences, among others. Students will conduct research on a particular modality in conversation with recent trends in health in modern allopathy while evaluating efficacy, scope and place of traditional modalities.