O discurso da saúde no espiritismo: do magnetismo à autocura

Abstract

This work aims to show the historical course of the spiritist discourse on health and its practices, considering the notion of a priori history and archive in Foucault. Part of the analysis of the basic literature of Allan Kardec, whose ideas were articulated with the magnetism in vogue in the 19th century, through homeopathic recipes, spiritual surgeries, less interventional treatments and, currently, self-healing, with guidelines in self-help books. In each of these epochs, spiritism conformed to the therapeutic culture in which its social actors were inserted in Europe and Brazil, Being affected, mainly, by the search of legitimacy of an incipient doctrine. But despite the different healing practices, the fundamental assumption remains, that is, there is a close connection between the material and the spiritual bodies, and the disease is the result of mental imbalance, of obsession, or of the karmic consequences arising from past lives.