Making Sense: The Construction of Feeling in the Atlantic World
In The Temple (1633), George Herbert observes that “broken bones may joy,/ And tune together in a well-set song.” Here, Herbert observes the interplay between ailments that affect both the spiritual and physical senses. Senses - understood to be those faculties that acquire knowledge vis-à-vis experience - serve as a shared vocabulary informing both spiritual (i.e., transcendent, religious) and physical (i.e., materialistic, naturalistic) means of treatment. But even in our own day, such connections among theories of sense, spiritual and physical illnesses, and their treatments reconfigure what we mean by “healing” in medical discourses.