Throughout history, healing has taken many forms—religious, magical, and often at odds with more rational medical or scientific practices. The book Croire et guérir offers a journey through the history of healing practices, ranging from relics of the Middle Ages to today’s diverse therapeutic approaches, revealing symbolic gestures and ancestral knowledge.
Divine punishment, acts of witchcraft, a stroke of bad luck, accidents, viral attacks, pollution, physiological disorders, aging, fatigue, stress… The causes of illness are manifold and fall into various categories, religious, spiritual, physical, and psychological.
To protect themselves from illness, all peoples have developed medical knowledge based empirically on the environment, the body, and the therapeutic properties of certain substances, though sometimes disconnected from anatomical, physiological, or naturalistic understanding. Ultimately, it is the complex, ambiguous, complementary, and antagonistic relationships between the soul and the body that are at the heart of this discussion.
Centered around more than 300 highly diverse images, including objects, photographs, and facsimiles, many of which have never been published before—the book features texts by numerous specialists (researchers, anthropologists, historians), as well as works by contemporary artists that offer a fresh perspective.
The resolutely contemporary layout deliberately plays with scales and compositions, transforming each page into a space to explore.
This book offers a surprising and unusual overview of healing and its many practices throughout history.