• Home
  • About Us
    • Sponsors
    • Executive Board
    • Advisory Board
    • Contact Us/Join Mailing List
  • 2023 CME
  • Student Scholarships
  • 2023 Plenary Speakers
  • Sunday Afternoon Workshops
  • 2023 Conference Schedule
  • 2023 Posters
Conference on Medicine and Religion

The Limits of Holistic Medical Care: Why Social Context Matters for Medicine, from St. Basil’s Hospital to American Hospitals Today
Kayal Parthiban, Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellow, Duke Divinity School 

Medical teams in US teaching hospitals often consist of several types of specialists. Physicians,  nurses, physical therapists, social workers, respiratory therapists, medical assistants, and more  stand at the foot of the patient’s bed. This is what passes for “interdisciplinary” care, but it falls  short in several ways. Physicians are burning out at incredibly high rates today, and even the best  medical care cannot provide a patient with the social needs that play a critical role in keeping  good health. In other words, the social context of American healthcare does not provide medical  care that adequately addresses social needs. In this paper, I look at St. Basil’s hospital in  Caesarea, often cited as the first Christian hospital, and analyze what makes this institution  radically different from what we see in healthcare today using historical and modern sources. 

The Basilea started differently from most hospitals today. With an overtly Christian mission to  provide a place for the poor, the orphans, the widows, the lepers, the elderly, and the sick, Basil’s  hospital situated medical care in within a hospitable social context. I will include Basil’s Sermon  to the Rich to show how his Christian commitment manifested publicly in monasterial medical  and social services. Healthcare today puts medical care at the forefront of hospitals, but the  uninsured, disenfranchised, and marginalized still struggle to heal in these spaces. Attempts at  interdisciplinary care fall short for patients that need deep social care, further revealing the limits  of current medicine. In contrast stands the Basilea: with inpatient facilities, a professional  medical staff, and charitable care, it certainly was a hospital. But it provided much more than  clinical care because of its wider Christian social commitment for a flourishing society. I will also draw from Gary Ferngren’s Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity and Andrew  Crislip’s From Monastery to Hospital to show that how Basil’s hospital combined Christian  charity, social services, and medical intervention in a creative monastic setting. 

I will then argue that the limits of American healthcare do not allow medical interventions to be  properly nested within charity and social services. As he traced American healthcare from its  inception in The Social Transformation of American Medicine, Paul Starr noted, “hospitals had  gone from treating the poor for the sake of charity to treating the rich for the sake of revenue and  only belatedly gave thought to the people in between.” What made the Basilea unique from prior  medical institutions was its monastic origin, where there was a focus on providing multi-faceted  services in a single large institution. On the other hand, American hospitals were created to  consolidate the power of physicians. This immense difference in inception serves as a point of  contrast, and now hospitals and the societies within which they are sustained often fall short of  providing holistic medical care. Instead of having clear practices that the Basilea outlined, the lack of a framework of social care leads to an overwhelming task for physicians as they attempt  to provide clinical and social care.