faith healing, recourse to divine power to cure mental or physical disabilities, either in conjunction with orthodox medical care or in place of it. Often an intermediary is involved, whose intercession may be all-important in effecting the desired cure. Sometimes the faith may reside in a particular place, which then becomes the focus of pilgrimages for the sufferers.
Faith in the healing power of natural springs is long-standing and widespread. In ancient Egypt and Greece, temples erected to Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, were often near such springs, and festivals in his honour have been located as far apart as Ancyra in Asia Minor and Agrigentum in Sicily. The cult was introduced in Rome to relieve a plague in 293 bc.
In Christianity, faith healing is exemplified especially in the miraculous cures wrought by Jesus (40 healings are recorded) and by his Apostles. The early church later sanctioned faith healing through such practices as anointing and the imposition of hands. Faith healing has also been associated with the intercessionary miracles of saints.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, faith healing has often motivated pilgrimages and healing services in many Christian denominations. The apparent healing gifts of individuals have also attracted wide attention: Leslie Weatherhead, Methodist pastor and theologian, and Harry Edwards, spiritualist, in England; Elsie Salmon, wife of a Methodist minister, in South Africa; Oral Roberts, a converted Methodist and mass-meeting evangelist, Agnes Sanford, wife of an Episcopal rector, and Edgar Cayce, a clairvoyant of Presbyterian background, in the United States. A different approach to the idea of divine healing is represented by the metaphysical healing movement in the United States called New Thought. Phineas P. Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy (a former patient of Quimby’s who founded the Christian Science movement) published numerous tracts exhorting their followers to beliefs that stressed the immanence of God and a link between bodily ills and mistaken convictions. Christian Science was unique in its view of sickness as a material state, subject to the transcendental power of the individual’s spiritual being.