Healing through Books: An Introduction

This Introduction provides an overview of the ways in which bibliotherapy has been defined and conceptualised. It connects the idea of the ‘healing book’ to the ancient Greek concept of the pharmakon; that is, the medicine that is simultaneously poison and remedy. It provides a brief account of how reading has been used to treat patients in a variety of institutional and therapeutic contexts across time and space. In doing so, it focuses particularly on bibliotherapy’s relationship with the treatment regimes and hospital libraries of the First World War. Finally, it relates bibliotherapy’s growing profile in the twenty-first century to wider anxieties about the future of reading and the value of literature. Seeking to harness the bibliotherapeutic potential within literature, this Introduction suggests, is a way of asserting the power and importance of reading at a moment when technological and educational developments threaten to sideline the written word and produce a generalised ‘crisis of reading’.