When you tell three familiar stories together, they become a new story. In these first two chapters, the historical background for the rest of this book, I follow a metaphor from its genesis in the Romantic period through its divergence into three separate intellectual traditions, and then to those traditions’ twentiethcentury reunification. That metaphor is therapeutic holism, already sketched in the introduction. Initially a legacy of the broader theoretical movement called Romantic organicism, therapeutic holism evolved to shape nineteenth-century definitions of great literature, good medicine, and the liberal self. In doing so, it forged links between these ideas, so that when mid-twentieth-century doctors, frustrated with biomedical reductionism, began seeking more humane approaches to patient care, they found a ready partner in literature as it was represented by therapeutic holism: an art whose materials and practices had the power to restore the ‘whole person’. Considered separately, therapeutic holism's influence on literary culture, medicine, and liberalism are well-known stories. There is a clear line of descent from German Romanticism's celebration of poetic holism to the New Criticism's ideally unified work of art; medical historians turn to the nineteenth century to explain the tense relationship between bodily cure and holistic healing; and intellectual historians recognize the influence of Romantic individualism in the nineteenth century's model of the liberal self. Yet, to my knowledge, no one has laid these stories alongside one another, nor shown how their tracks converge in the twentieth-century movement called the health humanities. That convergence is what chapters one and two will chart.

Because covering the same ground thrice would be tedious, I have organized these three stories into a rough chronology. Chapter one gives an overview of therapeutic holism, its sources in Romantic organicism, and its legacy in today's health humanities scholarship. It also introduces the medical history on which this book is based, including my findings from two summers of primary research into medical materials from 1770 through 1900 at London's Wellcome Library. After following therapeutic holism's influence on literary criticism and professional medicine into the twentieth century, chapter two offers a fuller account of the origin of the health humanities movement in the 1960s. It concludes by ruminating on the limitations of the legacy I have traced. Metaphors are powerful shapers of thought, and therapeutic holism has slipped some signally Romantic assumptions into the language of health humanities work.