Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine. By Wakoh Shannon Hickey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 324 pages. $29.95 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0190864248.
The primary concern of Mind Cure is the broad, diffuse Mindfulness movement that includes Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed by the microbiologist Jon Kabat-Zinn and “all the therapeutic derivatives of MBSR, collectively called MBIs [Mindfulness-Based Interventions]” (p. 8). In this timely study Wakoh Shannon Hickey aims to challenge many contemporary psychologists, physicians, and scientists’ presentation of the Mindfulness movement as secular. Drawing on her specialization in American religion, she associates the movement with the American Mind Cure or mind-body healing tradition “to tell a story that begins two centuries earlier, about people who set the stage on which Kabat-Zinn became a star” (p. 3).