Science & the Art of Healing (PB): Musical Education in England 1800-1860 and Its Continental Antecedents

Parallel to the development of consciousness toward our modern, so-called objectivity, Twentyman reveals a changing pattern of health and disease in society. The prevalence of diseases such as cancer, Parkinson s disease, and AIDS seems to be part of this history.

In modern medicine for all its brilliant achievements we search in vain for any true concept of healing. Separating the human being from the world of nature, medicine has reached a dead-end, because it does not recognize wholeness. Twentyman s warm understanding of wholeness leads to the recognition of healing, in its deepest sense, as a true art. In poison there is physic. William Shakespeare

Physiology, the study of the living organism, became dominated by chemical ideas, on the one hand, and by electrical ideas on the other. Since Volta had observed that frogs legs jerked when acted on by electrical stimuli, a tendency entered into physiology seeking in electricity the secret of life. This has led today to the crude ideas of the brain as a sort of enormously complicated computer or telephone exchange.... Life is abolished and the life of the soul can find no place in all this complicated machine in which to enter. Ralph Twentyman"