The meanings of health and illness: Medicine, religion and the body (original) (raw)

Bioethics and religions: Religious traditions and understandings of morality, health, and illness

Health Care Analysis, 2003

For many individuals, religious traditions provide important resources for moral deliberation. While contemporary philosophical approaches in bioethics draw upon secular presumptions, religion continues to play an important role in both personal moral reasoning and public debate. In this analysis, I consider the connections between religious traditions and understandings of morality, medicine, illness, suffering, and the body. The discussion is not intended to provide a theological analysis within the intellectual constraints of a particular religious tradition. Rather, I offer an interpretive analysis of how religious norms often play a role in shaping understandings of morality. While many late 19th and early 20th century social scientists predicted the demise of religion, religious traditions continue to play important roles in the lives of many individuals. Whether bioethicists are sympathetic or skeptical toward the normative claims of particular religious traditions, it is important that bioethicists have an understanding of how religious models of morality, illness, and healing influence deliberations within the health care arena.

Bioethics without God: The Transformation of Medicine within a Fully Secular Culture

Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality

Medicine is always set within particular cultural contexts and human interests. Central aspects of medical practice, such as concepts of health and disease, bioethical judgments, as well as the framing of healthcare policy, always intersect with an overlapping set of culturally situated communities (scientific, moral, religious, and political), each striving to understand as well as to manipulate the world in ways that each finds socially desirable, morally appropriate, aesthetically pleasing, politically useful, or otherwise fitting. Such taken-for-granted background conditions, in turn, impact clinical expectations, understandings of scientific findings, and appreciation of bioethical obligations. As background norms shift, so too do diagnostic categories as alternative modes of classification and treatment prove more useful for achieving socially, culturally, or politically desired outcomes. It is on this point that the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics strike an important chord. As the authors demonstrate, the most fundamental disagreements in bioethics turn on those who seek to frame culture and moral choice around the recognition of God's existence and those committed to recasting all of our social, moral, scientific, and cultural institutions in terms of a foundational atheism. In various ways, each paper illustrates that without canonical grounding in a fully transcendent God, morality-and epistemic claims more generally-are demoralized, deflated, and brought into question. From the religious practices that guide the provision of Catholic health care and the underlying social norms governing psychiatric medical diagnosis, to whether God should be subject to scientific measurement, and the supposed existence of a "common morality," the essays in this number of Christian Bioethics explore the implications of significant cultural changes that have impacted the taken-for-granted norms that undergird medicine and bioethics.

Treating the Body in Medicine and Religion

Modern medicine has produced many wonderful technological breakthroughs that have extended the limits of the frail human body. However, much of the focus of this medical research has been on the physical, often reducing the human being to a biological machine to be examined, understood, and controlled. This book begins by asking whether the modern medical milieu has overly objectified the body, unwittingly or not, and whether current studies in bioethics are up to the task of restoring a fuller understanding of the human person. In response, various authors here suggest that a more theological/religious approach would be helpful or perhaps even necessary. Presenting specific perspectives from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the book is divided into three parts: "Understanding the Body," "Respecting the Body," and "The Body at the End of Life." A panel of expert contributorsincluding philosophers, physicians, and theologians and scholars of religion-answers key questions such as: What is the relationship between body and soul? What are our obligations toward human bodies? How should medicine respond to suffering and death? The resulting text is an interdisciplinary treatise on how medicine can best function in our societies. Offering a new way to approach the medical humanities, this book will be of keen interest to any scholars with an interest in contemporary religious perspectives on medicine and the body.

Modern Medical Science and the Divine Province of God

Drawing on a large cache of letters to John and Frances Gunther after the death of their son as well as memoirs and fiction by bereaved parents, this essay challenges the assumptions of secularization that infuse histories of twentieth-century American medicine. Many parents who experienced the death of children during the postwar period relied heavily on religion to help make sense of the tragedies medicine could not prevent. Parental accounts included expression of belief in divine intervention and the power of prayer, gratitude for God's role in minimizing suffering, confidence in the existence of an afterlife, and acceptance of the will of God. Historians seeking to understand how parents and families understood both the delivery of medical care and the cultural authority of medical science must integrate an understanding of religious experiences and faith into their work.

Distinctions and Differentiations between Medicine and Religion

Asian Medicine, 2019

This special section of Asian Medicine brings together three scholars of the history of healing practices and medicine in premodern Asian societies to explore whether and how emic boundaries between religion and medicine were drawn in different historical contexts. In this introduction, we use the example of ancient Japan in an attempt to show how first steps towards a separation of religion and medicine can be identified, even when they have not yet been clearly differentiated institutionally or distinguished conceptually as distinct fields of action. By doing so, we operation-alize the macro-sociological question central to the 'multiple secularities' approach, namely how 'secular' fields of action-here, curing disease-emancipate themselves from 'religion' in premodern 'non-Western' societies. We propose to look for differences in the framing and interpretation of healing activities, for the ascription of either (professional) competence or (religious) charisma to the healers, to ask whether the activities are to be interpreted as a social function or service, and to identify the sources of authority and legitimacy. This is followed by a brief summary and discussion of the contributions by Selby, Czaja, and Triplett.

Review of 'Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction

Reviews in history, 2014

As Ferngren explains in the opening pages: 'My purpose in this volume is to provide a concise but comprehensive survey that traces the history of the intersection of medicine and healing with religious traditions in the Western world from the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt to our own era'; a sizeable task to say the least. The chronological and geographical scope of work is striking, taking the reader on a journey through eight distinct eras: one, 'The ancient Near East'; two, 'Greece'; three, 'Rome'; four, 'Early Christianity'; five, 'The Middle Ages'; six, 'Islam in the Middle Ages'; seven, 'The early modern period'; and eight, 'The nineteenth and twentieth centuries'. Preceding these chapters, the author's 'acknowledgements' provides readers with helpful guidelines about what to expect along the way: 'I have not written a scholarly monograph but rather an introduction intended for non-specialists who wish to gain an understanding of the place of religion in the Western medical and healing traditions'. He duly explains his decision to avoid arcane language and technical medical terms, keep annotation to a minimum, and confine the notes chiefly to citations rather than to extended discussions. In addition, the author directs readers seeking to pursue subjects of special interest to an extensive bibliography of secondary literature on medicine and religion available at the publisher's website: www.press.jhu.edu [2] (p. ix-x).