On Learning to Heal

“On Learning to Heal is the memoir-cum-medical philosophy of an intellectual with a humiliating chronic illness and his ultimately successful attempt to find a way of being both inside and outside his disease. It follows his struggles first to manage his illness and then to live with it, until finally he turns his attention to the so much that was working in his body—breathing, moving, being. What Cohen wants us to know is that if we are alive, then there is health within us. If his ideas were followed, you would be tuned instead to what is working in your body and not to what is not working, and you might find very little wrong with you and much that is right with you.” - Victoria Sweet, author of Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing

“With touching and incisive autobiographical accounts, Ed Cohen leads readers on a journey through his own entangling of bodily experience in relation to the limitations of modern medical thought. Part captivating story about his experience with and recovering from a devastating illness and part history and critique of the biomedical models that failed to fully comprehend his disease, On Learning to Heal is a compelling and beautiful book.” - Vincanne Adams, author of Glyphosate and the Swirl: An Agroindustrial Chemical on the Move

"An optimistic, ruminative appreciation for the art, the power, and the cultivation of human healing." - Kirkus Reviews

"On Learning to Heal is affirming, informative, inviting, and accessible. It is revelatory in asking us —chronically ill people in particular—to view our ailing, aching bodies as miraculous in their capacity for healing. Equally fantastic is how it reveals to us the elitist, exclusionary, capital-led history behind belief systems that the medical industry has manufactured as blatant truths." - Andrea Marks-Joseph, Independent Book Review

"[A] probing critique . . . [I]ncisive and will win over those wary of the outré considerations of the role 'energy' plays in alternative healing. The searching questions raised are well worth considering." - Publishers Weekly

"[Cohen's] story reminds us that words matter, and carefully phrased explanations can facilitate understanding and healing. His journey demonstrates the incredible power of a compassionate and open-minded clinician."

"Ed Cohen poses deeper challenges to biomedical thinking, urging his readers to critically consider what happens when the medical encounter becomes a scientific one, and what is thereby lost in terms of other possibilities for embodiment and healing." - Elizabeth Bernstein, Public Books

"Cohen recalls his harrowing, lifelong, and potentially soul-killing struggle with the vicious and capricious manifestations of a treatable, but incurable, intestinal affliction. In doing so, he casts a historical and philosophical perspective, both scholarly and intensely personal, on the meaning of healing beyond and within centuries of medical science, practice, and theory. He finds new ways to live and cultivate the vis medicatrix naturae (or healing power of nature) as distinct from and parallel to the treat-and-cure efforts of the physicians and hospitals that have ameliorated his symptoms and saved his life. . . . Recommended. Graduate students, faculty, and professionals. General readers."
  - Choice

"Cohen’s On Learning to Heal is also an excellent example of autotheory’s affordances at the level of epistemology and methodology. The book seeks to foster practices of healing, practices about which, it convincingly argues, Western medicine, focused as it is on pathology, treatment, and cure, knows little." - Stephanie Clare, Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory