Fides Ancilla Medicinae: On the Ersatz liturgy of death in biopsychosociospiritual medicine

Heythrop Journal - Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 20-43

  Bishop, Jeffrey P ^a   Rosemann, Philipp W ^b   Schmidt, Frederick W ^c  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF DALLAS   (United States)

^c SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149607535     PISSN: 00181196     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2007.00355.x     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Michel Foucault. (Reprint edition 1994). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994)
2. Bonaventure, Legenda major, 14.4 (edited in Analecta Franciscana 10 [1926-41]: 555-626, at 622)
3. Mark D. Jordan, 'The Very Idea of Disease', in Death, Sickness and Health in Medieval Society and Culture, ed. Susan J. Ridyard, Sewanee Mediaeval Studies 10 (Sewanee, Tenn.: University of the South Press, 2000), 55-75, 75
4. Our brief sketch of early medieval medical practices is mainly based upon Kay Peter Jankrift, Krankheit und Heilkunde in Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), 21-40
5. For further background, see Nancy C. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990)
6. For a discussion of the way unction is treated in the standard theological textbook of the medieval universities, see Philipp W. Rosemann, Peter Lombard, Great Medieval Thinkers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 168-9
7. See M.-D. Chenu, O.P., describes this phenomenon magisterially in his book, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968)
8. Another excellent study of the changing academic and social climate in the twelfth century is C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe, 950-1200, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), esp. Parts Two and Three
9. Nancy C. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 11
10. See Roger French, Medicine before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
11. See Johannes Grabmeyer, Europa im späten Mittelalter 1250-1500: Eine Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), 102.
12. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 126
13. See Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Challenges in Contemporary Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
14. See especially chapter 5, Searphic Voices: the Space of Doxology, 220-252
15. See H. Beecher, 'A Definition of Irreversible Coma: Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death', Journal of the American Medical Association 205 (1968): 337-40
16. See Martin Pernick, 'Brain Death in Cultural Context: The Reconstruction of Death 1967-1981' in Defining Death in a Technological Age, ed. Stuart Youngner and Robert Arnold (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)
17. See Margaret Lock, Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death (Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, 2002)
18. Lock, quoting the proceedings of the Cape Town symposium, 13-16 July 1968, Experience with Human Heart Transplantation, ed. Hillel A. Shipiro (Durban: Butterworths, 1968), 87
19. See John David Morenski, John J. Oro, Joseph D. Tobias and Amolak Singh, 'Determination of Death by Neurological Criteria', Journal of Intensive Care Medicine 18 (2003): 211-21
20. See René Descartes, 'Treatise on Man' in The Pilosophical Writings of Descartes translated by John Cottingwood, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugal Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 99-108. See especially p. 106
21. See George L. Engel, 'The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine', Science 196, no. 428 (1977): 129-36
22. referring to an article by J. Cassel, American Journal of Public Health 54 (1964): 1482
23. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972)
24. Originally published under the title L'archéologie du savoir by Editions Gallimard, 1969
25. See J. Andrew Billings, 'What is Palliative Care?', Journal of Palliative Medicine 1, no. 1 (1998): 73-81
26. See Peter J. Franks and Chris Salsibury, et al., 'The Level of Need for Palliative Care: A Systematic Review of the Literature', Palliative Medicine 14 (2000): 93-104, at 94
27. Ruth D. Powazki and Declan Walsh, 'Acute Care Palliative Medicine: Psychosocial Assessment of Patients and Primary Caregivers', Palliative Medicine 13 (1999): 367-74, at 373. We choose here to focus on a single study that looks at the assessment as a valuable tool. To our knowledge there are no philosophical evaluations of assessments that seek to understand the role of assessing in any aspect of medicine. In other words, the assessment is so valuable as a tool to medicine that it is assumed by all to be standard in medicine. Therefore, we have chosen to discuss the assessment as it is implicitly understood in palliative care and used in a particular study. The study cited above does not express anything differently from other studies. In this sense, it is in no way atypical by comparison with any other
28. nd ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 26-7
29. Powazki and Walsh, 'Acute Care Palliative Medicine', 373.
30. See L. Paton, 'The Sacred Circle: A Conceptual Framework for Spiritual Care in Hospice', American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care 13 (1996): 52-6
31. David G. Hamilton, 'Believing in Patients' Beliefs: Physician Attunement to the Spiritual Dimension as a Positive Factor in Patient Healing and Health', American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care 15 (1998): 276-9
32. Allan Kellehear, 'Spirituality and Palliative Care: A Model of Needs', Palliative Medicine 14 (2000): 149-55.
33. Hamilton, 'Believing in Patients' Beliefs', 278.
34. See L. Baider and M. Sarell, 'Perceptions and Causal Attributions of Israeli Women with Breast Cancer concerning their Illness: The Effects of Ethnicity and Religiosity', Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 39 (1983): 136-43
35. A.D. Weisman and J.W. Worden, 'The Existential Plight in Cancer: Significance of the First 100 Days', International Journal of Psychiatry and Medicine 7 (1976): 1-5
36. Billings, 'What is Palliative Care?', 79.
37. See George Fitchett, Assessing Spiritual Needs: A Guide for Caregivers (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993)
38. See especially H. Tristram Engelhardt, 'Generic Chaplaincy: Providing Spiritual Care in a Post-Christian Age', Christian Bioethics 4 (1998): 231-8. Engelhardt relates a story about an Orthodox Christian whose family requests that their priest be called by the chaplain to administer Holy Unction and Holy Communion. The chaplain refused to do so, insisting that she could minister to the family and the patient at his time of death and that it was therefore not necessary to call the priest. - The patient died without receiving the sacraments
39. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 40-55.
40. See Pickstock, After Writing, 1-114.
41. Personal communication with Fr. Lawrence Stasyszen