Retreat: How the Counterculture invented Wellness

What have the hippies ever done for us? Matthew Ingram explores the relationship between the summer of love and wellness, medicine, and health.

What have the hippies ever done for us? Matthew Ingram explores the relationship between the summer of love and wellness, medicine, and health.

The counterculture of the Sixties and the Seventies is remembered chiefly for music, fashion, art, feminism, computing, black power, cultural revolt and the New Left. But an until-now unexplored, yet no less important aspect – both in its core identity and in terms of its ongoing significance and impact – is its relationship with health.

In this popular and illuminating cultural history of the relationship between health and the counterculture, Matthew Ingram connects the dots between the beats, yoga, meditation, psychedelics, psychoanalysis, Eastern philosophy, sex, and veganism, showing how the hippies still have a lot to teach us about our wellbeing.