| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 96.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900. By Heather D. Curtis. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv, 269pp. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8018-8686-7.)

What is the best way for a Christian to deal with sickness and pain? Should the patient seek medical help from an earthly physician; pray to God for strength to suffer and endure; or, believing that the great physician still heals as he once did in Galilee, live an "acting faith" that affirms both a physical and spiritual healing despite any empirical evidence to the contrary? How and why American adherents to the late nineteenth-century divine healing movement rejected an "afflictive providence" and substituted an "alternative devotional ethic that uncoupled the longstanding link between corporeal suffering and spiritual holiness" (p. 6) is the fascinating story told by Heather D. Curtis, an assistant professor of the history of Christianity and American religion at Tufts University, in Faith in the Great Physician.

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