Medicine as Healing Vocation: Disenchantment and the Moral Power of Narrative
Courtney Campbell, PhD., Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture, Oregon State University
Weber’s assertion that “the world is disenchanted” is situated within his analysis of whether science, including medicine, comprises a vocation. The disenchanted world has been divested of mystery and wonder, meaning, ritual, and story. The contention of my paper is that each of these features is critical to understanding medicine as a vocation of healing or among the healing professions.
I will begin my presentation through a frame articulated in the “Physician’s Charter for the New Millennium” that the shared identity of physicians regardless of culture or tradition is expressed through the identity of “healer.” That means that understanding what medicine is about requires investigation into the elements or features of healing. I will then provide an overview of eight moral presuppositions of healing practice, as embedded in various biblical narratives of healing. This overview includes features of healing as wholeness, as authority, as relationship, as embodied, as witnessing, as subversive critique, as re-storying, and as transforming identities.
I will then develop two or three of these concepts of healing more substantively with respect to their implications for medicine and medical practice: the story and re-storying feature of healing opens up a discussion of the significance of narrative as both a path of “re-enchantment” in medicine (as suggested by scholar Arthur Frank) and as essential to medicine’s vocational understanding as a commitment to healing, as developed by physician Lisa Sanders. The witnessing and transformational features of healing are embedded in discussions by physicians such as Abraham Verghese and of scholars such as Schenck and Churchill (Healers, 2012), which intimate ways of reinvesting the medical relationship between physician and patient with meaning, ritual, and wonder in the presence of the mystery that is healing.
Weber’s assertion that “the world is disenchanted” is situated within his analysis of whether science, including medicine, comprises a vocation. The disenchanted world has been divested of mystery and wonder, meaning, ritual, and story. The contention of my paper is that each of these features is critical to understanding medicine as a vocation of healing or among the healing professions.
I will begin my presentation through a frame articulated in the “Physician’s Charter for the New Millennium” that the shared identity of physicians regardless of culture or tradition is expressed through the identity of “healer.” That means that understanding what medicine is about requires investigation into the elements or features of healing. I will then provide an overview of eight moral presuppositions of healing practice, as embedded in various biblical narratives of healing. This overview includes features of healing as wholeness, as authority, as relationship, as embodied, as witnessing, as subversive critique, as re-storying, and as transforming identities.
I will then develop two or three of these concepts of healing more substantively with respect to their implications for medicine and medical practice: the story and re-storying feature of healing opens up a discussion of the significance of narrative as both a path of “re-enchantment” in medicine (as suggested by scholar Arthur Frank) and as essential to medicine’s vocational understanding as a commitment to healing, as developed by physician Lisa Sanders. The witnessing and transformational features of healing are embedded in discussions by physicians such as Abraham Verghese and of scholars such as Schenck and Churchill (Healers, 2012), which intimate ways of reinvesting the medical relationship between physician and patient with meaning, ritual, and wonder in the presence of the mystery that is healing.