Ed Cohen
We are excited to start working with Professor Ed Cohen who has a Ph.D. in Modern Thought from Stanford and for the last three decades has been an award-winning professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality at Rutgers University. As a professor, he encourages students to reflect critically on things they often assume to be self-evident about themselves (e.g., their sex, their sexuality, their gender) and asks them to consider whether there are more possibilities for who they can become than they currently imagine. Too often we make assumptions about who we can be, which we take up from our families, our histories, and our cultures, that unnecessarily limit our abilities to live otherwise. His job as a teacher is to help his students learn to think beyond these limits in order to support them in creating better futures—both for themselves and for us all.
Drawing on these skill sets, Professor Cohen also counsels people interested in healing and offers them opportunities to think deeply about what their illnesses mean to them. His goal is to help other people with chronic and life-threatening illnesses ponder how medicine describes what’s happening to us and to explore possibilities for healing that, given its primary focus on diagnosis and treating, medicine often fails to entertain. Healing is not only a biological capacity. Because we are living beings healing concerns all the aspects of who we are: physical, psychological, social, and spiritual. In other words, learning to heal entails learning to realize ourselves in our fullest and most expansive capacities.
On Learning to Heal or, What Medicine Doesn't Know
At thirteen, Ed Cohen was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease—a chronic, incurable condition that nearly killed him in his early twenties. At his diagnosis, his doctors told him that the best he could hope for was periods of remission. Unfortunately, they never mentioned healing as a possibility. In On Learning to Heal, Cohen draws on fifty years of living with Crohn’s to consider how Western medicine’s turn from an “art of healing” toward a “science of medicine” deeply affects both medical practitioners and their patients. He demonstrates that although medicine can now offer many seemingly miraculous therapies, it is not and has never been the only way to enhance healing. Exploring his own path to healing, he argues that learning to heal requires us to desire and value healing as a vital possibility. With this book, Cohen advocates reviving healing’s role for all those whose lives are touched by illness.
On Learning to Heal is forthcoming from Duke University Press Books on January 10, 2023.
Stay tuned for updates!
