Religious Studies Review, Vol. 46, No. 3, September 2020 © 2020 Rice University 359 Review Essay Defining Health and Religion: Mindfulness and Buddhism MIND CURE: HOW MEDITATION BECAME MEDICINE By Wakoh Shannon Hickey, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019 Pp. xi + 324. Hardcover, $29.95. PRESCRIBING THE DHARMA: PSYCHOTHERAPISTS, BUDDHIST TRADITIONS, AND DEFINING RELIGION By Ira Helderman, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019 Pp. viii + 314. Paper, $29.95. REVIEWER: Kin Cheung Moravian College Bethlehem, PA 18018 For some, health is a straightforward concept. Dictionaries pro- vide a negative—and less often, a positive—definition of health: free from injury or illness; a sound body and mind. However, the philosophy of medicine reveals a deep debate over how to define medicine, health, and disease (Reiss and Ankeny 2016). The two books reviewed here are about how Buddhist-based meditation practices—including, but not limited to, mindfulness—have been employed as medical interventions in America. Their focus on definitions of health and religion separate them from numerous other monographs on mindfulness published in 2019, including noteworthy critical perspectives in McMindfulness by Ronald Purser, and Mindfulness and Its Discontents by David Forbes. In Mind Cure, Wakoh Shannon Hickey asks what gets lost when mindfulness is medicalized? In Prescribing the Dharma, Ira Helderman asks what are the myriad ways that American psy- chotherapists define religion? Hickey argues the Mindfulness movement is a specific type of religion and has a history in the late nineteenth century American religious groups of Christian Science and New Thought. Helderman considers the effects of the contemporary labeling of Buddhist-based practices such as mindfulness, as religious or not. What is at stake here is giving a platform to voices typically ignored in conversations around Buddhist-based practices including and beyond mindfulness: those of women, ethnic and racial minorities, and the medi- cal professionals who use, or refuse to use, a range of these practices in treating patients. The neglect of such voices can be partially attributed to academics and scholars who contribute to this discourse. The two authors here are reflexive on how the questions they pursue can impact the communities they write about. These two books by Hickey and Helderman were spot- lighted at the November 2019 meeting of The American Academy of Religion in an authors meet critics session titled “Meditation, Buddhism, and Mental Health: State of the Field,” sponsored by the Psychology, Culture, and Religion Unit and the Religions, Medicines, and Healing Unit. I mention this here because I will refer to comments by my co-panelists Francisca Cho, Franz Metcalf, and Nicolee Jikyo McMahon later in this review essay. Mind Cure provides a carefully researched religious his- tory of meditation-as-medicine that explains the developmen- tal roots of mindfulness in the American religious landscape, which includes “Christianity, Judaism, Transcendentalism, Western esotericism (particularly Theosophy), Buddhism, and Hindu neo-Vedanta” (37). In examining the nineteenth cen- tury, Hickey investigates what Jeff Wilson (2014) left out in his Mindful America. She untangles how the late 1860s and 1870s Christian Science and New Thought were lumped together as the Mind Cure movement. She starts with the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) on American religion and healing, including Homeopathy, Mesmerism, Mind Cure, Mormonism, Mysticism, Shakerism, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism, and more. Hickey provides immensely helpful visual depictions that map out relationships and multi-directional arrows of influence of this complicated web of ideas and movement of thought. “Mind Cure is an important and vastly underappreciated precursor to the modern Mindfulness boom. To understand early Mind Cure—as well as contemporary efforts to promote meditation in medicine—it is essential to notice the ways that race and gender shaped the movement and subsequent re- ligious and medical developments” (37). Hickey describes how women contributed to religious community building, but the best healing techniques were taken by men to be used in their space, and how white Americans used black Americans to experiment on and observe for medical purposes in un- ethical manners. She draws a parallel between the rhetori- cal connection of its practices to science by the Emmanuel Movement, an early twentieth century “collaboration be- tween elite, psychologically trained clergy and orthodox physicians” (101) and “[t]he appeal to mainstream medical science by white, male spokespersons with Establishment credentials … [as] a factor in the success of the contempo- rary Mindfulness movement’s efforts to promote meditation as medicine” (122). Hickey employs gender and racial analy- sis to examine this extraction of practice out of context. She