Joseph W. Williams offers a compelling examination of the changing healing practices of pentecostals in the United States over the past hundred years, from the early believers, who rejected mainstream medicine and overtly spiritualized disease, to the later generations of pentecostals and their charismatic successors, who dramatically altered the healing paradigms they inherited.

Williams shows that over the course of the twentieth century, pentecostal denunciations of the medical profession often gave way to "natural" healing methods associated with scientific medicine, natural...