Herbert Benson, a Harvard-trained cardiologist whose research showing the power of mind over body helped move meditation into the mainstream, died on Feb. 3 at a hospital in Boston. He was 86.
His wife, Marilyn Benson, said the cause was heart disease and kidney failure.
Dr. Benson did not set out to champion meditation; in fact, even after his first pioneering studies, he remained a skeptic, picking up the practice himself only decades later.
He was, however, open to the possibility that state of mind could affect a person’s health — common sense today, but a radical, even heretical idea when he began researching it in the mid-1960s. (continue reading…)