To Feel What Others Feel: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect

219 Pages·2012·2.24 MB·English

by  Stewart Justman

UC Berkeley
Perspectives in Medical Humanities
Title
To Feel What Others Feel: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/38h7x0m7
ISBN
9780983463993
Author
Justman, Stewart
Publication Date
2013-01-13
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of California
To Feel What
Others Feel
Social Sources of the Placebo Effect
Perspectives in Medical Humanities
Perspectives in Medical Humanities publishes peer reviewed scholarship produced
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To My Wife and Children

To Feel What
Others Feel
Social Sources of the Placebo Effect
Stewart Justman
University of California Medical Humanities Press
2012
First published in 2012
by University of California Medical Humanities Press
in partnership with eScholarship | University of California
San Francisco – berkeley – london
© 2012 by Stewart Justman
University of California
Medical Humanities Consortium
3333 California Street, Suite 485
San Francisco, CA 94143-0850
Cover Design by Eduardo de Ugarte
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012953399
isbn (paperback) 978-0-9834639-9-3
Printed in usa
Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Heartsease: Medicine and Social Context 16
2 Suicide in Utopia 23
3 Malady and Remedy in Hamlet 30
4 The Power of Suggestion: Eve and the Apple 41
5 To Feel What Others Feel:
Two Episodes from 18th-Century Medicine 48
6 To Feel What Others Feel: Mind and Body 59
7 The Invalidism of Mr. Woodhouse 71
8 The Transfusion of Life:
Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” 77
9 The Pollyanna Principle 84
10 Medicine Marketed: Two Episodes 90
11 The Power of Rhetoric:
Two Healing Movements 102
12 From Medicine to Psychotherapy:
The Placebo Effect 116
13 Can Placebos Survive Disclosure? 132
14 Suicide in Dystopia: “Howl” 142
15 The Prostate Cancer Epidemic—
What Spawned It? 148
Epilogue 158
Notes 163
Index 202
Acknowledgments
My gratitude goes to Linda Frey, Marsha Frey, Cory Harris, Richard
McNally, Michael Mayer, and Amir Raz; to Drs. Barnett Kramer, Andrew
Leuchter, Jean-Luc Mommaerts, Paul Schellhammer, and Anthony Zietman;
to Frederick Crews, who first got me interested in the placebo effect; and to
series editor Brian Dolan for his unfailing help.