Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock
Abstract
I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology—a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world—that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of “seeing” them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.
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Notes
Neil Postman offers a helpful account of the ways in which Frederick Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management served to establish a kind of technological theology, which he calls “technopoly.” Technopoly pervades culture, substituting technical calculation for human judgment and establishing efficiency as summum bonum (see [6, pp. 51–52]). For an account of medicine as bureaucratic, see MacIntyre [13, pp. 84–89].
This essay appears in slightly different form as “The Melancholy of Anatomy” in the February 2015 edition of Harper’s Magazine [18].
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Stanley Hauerwas, Brian Volck, and my colleague Dr. James Wallace, all of whom read earlier drafts of this essay and offered helpful comments. Ashley Moyse and Matthew Vest were very helpful in helping me revise the essay to address the specific concerns of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. Finally, I am grateful to the audience to whom the essay was first read at the 2017 Conference in Medicine and Religion in Houston, Texas. Their questions and gentle criticisms helped strengthen the argument of subsequent revisions.
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Shuman, J.J. Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy. Theor Med Bioeth 39, 473–481 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-018-9469-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11017-018-9469-5