Faith in the Great Physician

Heather D. Curtis is an assistant professor of the history of Christianity and American religion at Tufts University.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. A Thorn in the Flesh: Pain, Illness, and Religion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America2. Resisting Resignation: The Rise of Religious Healing in the Late Nineteenth Century3. Acting Faith: The Devotional Ethics and Gendered Dynamics of Divine Healing4. The Use of Means: Divine Healing as Devotional Practice5. Houses of Healing: Sacred Space, Social Geography, and Gender in Divine Healing6. The Lord for the Body, the Gospel for the Nations: Divine Healing and Social ReformConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

Heather Curtis has done both the historical guild and the church a great favor in so elegantly narrating the history of a movement that challenged long-standing assumptions about the spiritual utility of corporal pain-and, in so doing, remapped our imaginations and transformed our understanding of suffering. -- Lauren F. Winner Books and Culture: A Christian Review 2008 Students of American religious history and American culture will find this work worthy of attention. Recommended. Choice An illuminating and exceedingly careful examination of a historical terrain chock-full of landmines... Its careful attention to the experiences of both laity and elites is as strong as its evenhanded interpretation. -- Mark A. Noll Christian Century 2008 Fascinating story told by Heather D. Curtis. -- Rennie B. Schoepflin Journal of American History 2009 Thoughtfully rendered study. -- Paul Harvey American Studies 2007 Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900 is an engaging and informative analysis of the divine healing movement, grounded in a wide-ranging view of its social and cultural, medical and religious milieu... Heather Curtis is to be commended for this splendid contribution to the scholarship of the era. -- Nancy A. Hardesty Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Lyrical and convincing. -- Pamela E. Klassen Church History 2010 Careful historical research that scholars of American religion and American history will find indispensable. -- Lynn S. Neal Journal of Religion 2010