Healing Wisdom
As a medical essayist, Larry Dossey is the William James of our time. I have a number of volumes containing essays by James, one of which is called 'on a certain blindness in human beings'. He was talking about our blindness with respect to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves. The blindness diagnosed by Larry in some of these essays concerns people and views different from ourselves. Those imbued with scientific materialism cannot see or understand the value and hidden meaning of mystery and miracles, about which Larry writes with such insight and eloquence. So far as they are concerned, these things simply don't exist, and no evidence to the contrary can be admitted as valid.

William James was fond of quoting other people to support his views, a practice which Larry follows to great effect. Indeed in the same essay, James refers to Wordsworth and Shelley as 'full of this sense of the limitless significance in natural things', which directly evokes the title of this volume. A number of the essays have been developed from editorials first printed in the Journal Alternative Therapies, which Larry edited for nearly 10 years from 1995. In an age of increasing complexity, Larry focuses on simplicity and wholeness, not with a view to idealising simple things, but rather to focus 'on a variety of simplicities that can bring healing and fulfilment to our lives, and which often do.'

The titles are very simple: optimism, forgetting, novelty, tears, dirt, music, risk, plants, bugs, unhappiness, nothing, voices, mystery, miracles. In every context, Larry has something original and instructive to say. His interest in etymology comes through, as does his curiosity about the history of the topic he is treating. And, as Andrew Harvey remarks in his endorsement of the book, there are some delightful quirky and funny elements to boot. In his essay on forgetting, Larry writes about the curse of a perfect memory reminds us that there are many things best forgotten. Paradoxically, as the French proverb points out, 'to want to forget something is to think of it.' Towards the end of this piece, Larry observes that we all forget pin numbers and passwords, reassuring us that he just yesterday bumped into a website through which one can retrieve forgotten passwords. He would have been happy to share the site name with us, but he's forgotten it!

Some essays take aim at political correctness. The one on dirt, for instance, quotes the hygiene hypothesis, which asserts that too much cleanliness is bad for us and that we need germs to challenge our immune systems. Nor is it good for us as a society to become too risk averse. The piece on bugs describes the history of using maggots to treat infected wounds, a practice that has been revived with great success in spite of the obvious yuck factor.

One of my favourite essays is the one on Nothing. To return to William James for a moment, he recounts the story in which a white man meets an Indian chief. The chief says to his white guest 'you will never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things.' Medically, spontaneous remission is the result of doing nothing, while Larry cites one report where the patients who were not receiving primary care had a better outcome after six months than those who were. Indeed, there were 25% more deaths in the group getting the extra attention. Placebos are also, in a sense, nothing. Not doing is extolled in Daoist Chinese philosophy while the Buddhists maintain that emptiness is central and scientists that the quantum vacuum is the origin of everything. Larry observes that our vocabulary reveals an aversion to nothing, to the minimal. At Starbucks, the smallest coffee you can buy is a Tall, and everything has become 'awesome'. Silence is also under siege from constant noise and loafing is considered unproductive by those addicted to activity.

Neither William James nor Larry Dossey is unfamiliar with the extraordinary capacities of human consciousness. James was fully involved in the psychical research of his day, which he considered to be a natural part of psychology. Larry is also conversant with all this literature, as well as the literature of healing, prayer and miracles. Both argue against the medical materialism of their day and look towards the widening of horizons in science and medicine. Both also have a close affinity for the wisdom of nature and the rhythms of the natural world. I am sure that Larry would agree with the final sentence of James's essay: 'it is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.'. Nor can one disagree with his previous remark to the effect that 'neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.' The perspective given by these essays makes for a stimulating and enjoyable read.