Content area
Full Text
Healing Places by Wilbert M. Gesler, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD, 2003, ix+144pp., cloth US$60.00 (ISBN 0-7425-1955-4), paper US$22.95 (ISBN 0-7425-1956-2)a
The therapeutic landscape concept has been given much thought over the last two decades, thanks to the pioneering work of WiI Gésier, who first introduced it to geographers in 1992, and who has since been using it as a lens for exploring the healing qualities of specific places. The cumulative knowledge gained from in-depth case study research of a wide-ranging sample of healing sites over the past two decades situates Gésier as one of the foremost thinkers on the links between place and health. Taking a humanistic approach, Gésier returns to sites reputed as achieving lasting reputations for healing and applies what he has learned from these sites to evaluate healing places in modern healthcare institutions.
In Healing Places, three sites, Epidauros, Bath and Lourdes, are revisited to investigate how...