| Faith healing entered Canada as an informal network of women who shared testimonials and prayers with each other. By the 1920s, evangelistic healing campaigns in large urban centres were drawing tens of thousands on a daily basis. This work traces the development of divine healing within Canadian Protestantism by examining a wide variety of groups that engaged in the practice, including the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Salvation Army, the Christian Catholic Church, and Pentecostalism. It also analyzes the diverse reactions to divine healing on the part of fundamentalists, mainline Protestants, the medical community, and the state.;By framing the phenomenon of divine healing as a history of the body, this dissertation presents a unique perspective on the multiple ways in which medical and religious discourses competed in their constructions of the body. Proponents of faith healing subverted the epistemological grounding of medical knowledge by turning instead to the personal subjective experience of religion as the authoritative basis to lay claim to "divine health." The social space in which faith healing took place was transformed over time, but the dominating presence of women remained a constant feature from the beginning.;This study explores the cultural practice of faith healing as both a devotional observance and a point of resistance to conventional medicine. It is argued that the act of healing took place within a matrix of religious and medical ideologies that were in turn enwrapped by constructions of gender, class, and social geography. By disentangling these complex layers of meaning, faith healing is historically situated as a particular way of viewing, and understanding, the body. |
