Music in Medicine

This 1946 volume stands as one of the first systematic attempts to codify what healers have intuited for millennia: that sound, carefully applied, can reach patients where medicine alone cannot. Sidney Licht draws a careful line between music as aesthetic experience and music as therapeutic intervention, arguing that clinicians must understand both. The book traces music's role in healing from ancient Greek temples through Napoleonic battlefield hospitals, arriving at its most urgent contemporary application: the wartime recovery of shell-shocked soldiers. Licht documents remarkable cases where music reached patients in catatonic or traumatic states when words failed entirely. He goes further, proposing physiological mechanisms, music's effects on heart rate, respiration, and nervous system arousal, that would not be confirmed by neuroscience until decades later. For anyone curious about how modern music therapy actually began, or how mid-century physicians first reconciled art and science, this book offers a vital historical lens.