Most of the histories of the West are obsessed with the shoot-em-ups. But what about the patch-em-ups? Who had to deal with all that famous carnage? With all the bloodletting depicted by pop culture historians, it almost seems a miracle anyone survived to settle the West. Prior to World War II regular, or allopathic, physicians trained in mainstream medicine were often outnumbered by alternative practitioners--folk curers, herbalists, faith healers, homeopaths, patent medicine promoters, and medicine showmen. Mystic Healers and Medicine Shows profiles many of the most significant of these healers as well as a few other colorful regular doctors.

In this thoroughly revised and updated edition, Paris Flammonde traces the history of alternative medicine from the deeds of the earliest shaman right up to the practices of such contemporary healers as Deepak Chopra and Benny Hinn.

Exposes the pretension and fraud that surrounds the faith healer business, revealing how alleged faith healers prey on the insecurities and vulnerabilities of the people they preach to.

Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation—the Atlas Portland Cement Company. In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal—home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence. To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight. Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender, class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.

With the clarity of a physicist and the compassion of a gifted healer with fifteen years of professional experience observing 5,000 clients and students, Barbara Ann Brennan presents the first in-depth study of the human energy field for people who seek happiness, health and their full potential. Our physical bodies exist within a larger "body," a human energy field or aura, which is the vehicle through which we create our experience of reality, including health and illness. It is through this energy field that we have the power to heal ourselves. This energy body -- only recently verified by scientists, but long known to healers and mystics -- is the starting point of all illness. Here, our most powerful and profound human interactions take place, the precursor and healer of all physiological and emotional disturbances. Hands of Light is your guide to a new wholeness. It offers: • A new paradigm for the human, in health, relationship, and disease • An understanding of how the human energy field looks, functions, is disturbed, healed, and interacts with friends and lovers. • Training in the ability to see and interpret auras • Medically verified case studies of healing people from all walks of life with a variety of illnesses. • Guidelines for healing the self and others. • The author's personal and intriguing life adventure which gives us a model for growth, courage and possibilities for expanded consciousness

Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst and scholar, brilliantly illuminates the ancient healing traditions of India embodied in the rituals of shamans, the teachings of gurus, and the precepts of the school of medicine known as Ayurveda. "With extraordinary sympathy, open-mindedness, and insight Sudhir Kakar has drawn from both his Eastern and Western backgrounds to show how the gulf that divides native healer from Western psychiatrist can be spanned."—Rosemary Dinnage, New York Review of Books "Each chapter describes the geographical and cultural context within which the healers work, their unique approach to healing mental illness, and . . . the philosophical and religious underpinnings of their theories compared with psychoanalytical theory."—Choice