pro
“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 was periods of remission. Unfortunately, they 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, it 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.
Cohen has a Ph.D. in Modern Thought from Stanford, and for the last three decades, has been an award-winning professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University.
I believe your listeners would be interested in a fresh perspective on how healing and medicine are (okay should be!) connected. Can healing teach us that we always depend on it and on each other in ways that medicine does not (yet) know?
*Profile managed by publicist, Nanda Dyssou*
