Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine in Ethiopia examines Ethiopia’s boldly graphic, medicinal healing scrolls. Whereas Westerners have long considered art and medicine as separate realms, Ethiopians consider them to be intimately and inextricably connected. Challenging the West’s narrowly conceived definition of art, Ethiopians believe artworks to be active forces that ensure health. The ability of Ethiopian artworks to heal believers demonstrates the interrelationship between art and religious faith and their effect on physical and mental health. A methodological discussion of the idea of healing art, the history and ideas of healing images in the Mediterranean world (Greek, Jewish, Christian, Muslim) is traced linking art and therapy. The most fundamental Ethiopian healing images and the various underlying ideas about their effectiveness are discussed in a variety of compelling media such as books of talismans, icons, church frescoes, and crosses dating from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. An examination of African healing arts, in this case Ethiopian scrolls, which for centuries developed incredibly diverse functions for objects used in connection with the human body and to communicate with the natural and supernatural worlds can considerably expand our understanding of art and its function.

Exhibition catalogue by Jacques Mercier with chapters: Healing Art: An Introduction, History: Therapeutic and Salvational Images in the West, Ethiopian Identities, Wise Men and Their Works, Spirituality and Representation, Original Aspects of the Effectiveness of the Scroll Images, The Object and the Body: Analogic Installations by the author, and contribution, Plastic Meaning and Psychosis: Anthropological Meaning and Therapeutic Effects of the Works of the Mentally Ill by Heni Maldiney. Published and distributed by The Museum for African Art, New York and Prestel, Munich, February 1977. 126 pp. Cloth: ISBN 3-7913-1606-0, Paper: ISBN 0-945802-19-6. LCCN: 96-80093.