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Reviews of Leder’s The Healing Body

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Philosophy of Medicine, review by Espen Dahl


Drew Leder’s new book, The Healing Body, provides rich descriptions and analyses of ways to live well when faced with bodily afflictions, such as pain, illness, impairment, and aging.


The Healing Body is a very well-written book, which is unsurprising as Leder has, for a long time, written philosophical texts in unusually accessible prose.

What makes the book a pleasure to read is his ability to stay close to lived experience by constantly drawing on examples, either from a rich array of literature (novels and poems, as well as biomedical, phenomenological, and religious texts) or from his own experience.


Philosophy of Medicine | DOI 10.5195/pom.2024.192| Volume 5| Issue1| pp.1–6
https://philmed.pitt.edu/philmed/article/view/192/74

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Journal of Clinical Evaluation, review by Pat McConville


Leder's text succeeds at being accessible, down to earth and peppered with engaging and relatable anecdotes demonstrating the strategies he discusses. Alongside published illness narratives and literary works, Leder describes and unpacks the experiences of colleagues, friends and himself. The result is both colourful and compelling.

He calls on a wide range of phenomenological, philosophical and sometimes medical and sociological research with ease and authority....These perspectives enable him to incorporate sociohistorical conditions in his analysis, especially considerations of racism, sexism, capitalism and ageism. Aging, in fact, constitutes a minor theme of the book and one chapter is dedicated to the rehabilitation, or ‘re-possibilization’, of elder life.

Journal of Clinical Evaluation, 18 February 2024 https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13959

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