Prayers is another one of those non-traditional allopathic and non-allopathic practices that has its revivals in alternative/complementary medical history.
People used to believe firmly in the power of prayer due to its association with their religion itself. But as natural theology beliefs gave way to nature and the inner teachings of natural philosophy during the early 19th century, the Emersonians, Waldenites, and other naturalists and scientists assigned new meaning to spiritual healing concepts, including the power of prayer-based healing practices.
Belief is often the direction taken by past writers of this tradition, but the continued renewal of energy form theories give people other avenues to take in their deductive and subjective reasoning given for how and why these unique ways of healing work. Like the acupuncture theory history of acceptance, the various energies defined over the years have given meaning to healers by touch and prayer, based on claims of universal energy, the internal god-self, the balance of the elements and fields of energies in and around the body, our hollow physical structure.
A century before Prince Hohnelohe started his movement in the power of prayer and healing, royal touch was often considered the prime example of how such a healing could take place. The cultural centricity of this philosophy is apparent–your king is great, and God honors him like he were a Saint or Pope, almost, and so gave that member of royalty some miraculous healing power. The Hans Christian Anderson-like way of imagining the fully dressed King with no clothes, as also having these miraculous healing powers, can be, was and is practiced by anyone in the right circumstances.
Prince Hohenlohe’s practice was very closely tied to the German cultural settings and their immediate neighbors throughout Prussia. The Bohemians and Moravians are expected to have some beliefs in what he did. The prime time for this belief system to influence United States cultural medicine is about 1800 to 1830, where we see some of the strongest possibilities for such as following in Middle Pennsylvania and Middle New York German community settings.
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Psychological and medical researches respecting the cures attributed to the prayers of Prince Hohenlohe by Pfeufer 1826
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Brian Altonen, MPH, MS 