Ritual efficacy and the power of belief

• Department of History

In the framework of the History Department Monthly Research Meetings, this event, co-organised by the History of Science and Medicine working group, will feature a talk by Rob Boddice (Tampere University).

In the 2010 book, The Problem of Ritual Efficacy, William Sax pointed out that what scholars tend to identify as ‘ritual’, those actually involved in them tend to see as a form of work, or technique, or practice, with a particular end in mind. The analytic distance of the scholar assumes, on the basis of the nonrationality of rituals, that they are intrinsically ineffective, save for being vehicles for expressing ‘inner states of feeling and emotion’. Sax asked a provocative question: how might they actually be ‘instrumental’; how might they ‘actually do things’? In this paper I ask the same question of ritual medical encounters. I am interested not only in the ‘pre-scientific’ procedures of folk medicinal cures, magic and quackery, but in the ritualized encounters of modern medicine. I take my cue from an overlooked observation of Charles Rosenberg that the placebo effect has to do with the ‘patterned interaction between doctor and patient, one which evolved over centuries into a conventionalized social ritual’, in order to disrupt an abiding ethical distaste for placebo and to ask: what happens to our understanding of the history of medicine and contemporary medical practice when we begin with the assumption that placebo effects (and their opposite, nocebo effects) are real?