Bacon, Residency and Christ
Benjamin Frush, MD, MA, Resident Physician, Vanderbilt University Medical Center
In his 1997 work “To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body,” Gerald McKenny describes how contemporary bioethics has lost the ability to entertain teleological understandings of the body and medical practice itself. Drawing primarily on the work of Charles Taylor, McKenny points to the philosophy of both Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes as the origin of this understanding of the body and medicine’s purpose. McKenny famously coins the term “The Baconian Project” which involves the two primary goals of modern bioethics: the ultimate purpose of harnessing biomedicine to relive suffering however it is perceived; and the expansion of free choice to the recipients of medical care.
My goal in this essay will be to explore how the Baconian Project manifests for a medical resident in 2020. Twenty three years after McKenny’s thesis was proposed, language of suffering relief and the emphasis on consumer choice seems to have intensified. My goal will be to draw out how both of these elements of the Baconian Project heavily color the everyday work of the resident in particular, and how these pressures are felt uniquely by medical trainees.
As McKenny argues, the alternative to a philosophy which offers no qualification for suffering relief and which views the unfettered expansion of choice can only be found in specific traditions which offer some purposed vision of both the body and medicine. I will describe how my experience as a Christian resident has served to orient me toward a teleological understanding of the patients I serve and goals toward which to strive which offer a meaningful alternative to the Baconian Project.
My goal in this essay will be to explore how the Baconian Project manifests for a medical resident in 2020. Twenty three years after McKenny’s thesis was proposed, language of suffering relief and the emphasis on consumer choice seems to have intensified. My goal will be to draw out how both of these elements of the Baconian Project heavily color the everyday work of the resident in particular, and how these pressures are felt uniquely by medical trainees.
As McKenny argues, the alternative to a philosophy which offers no qualification for suffering relief and which views the unfettered expansion of choice can only be found in specific traditions which offer some purposed vision of both the body and medicine. I will describe how my experience as a Christian resident has served to orient me toward a teleological understanding of the patients I serve and goals toward which to strive which offer a meaningful alternative to the Baconian Project.