Musings into Health, Healing, Home and Heroic Journeys
Tia Jamir, Ph.D., Chaplain Supervisor, Baylor Scott and White Health
R. Mark Grace, M.Div, ACPES, Chief Mission & Ministry Officer, Baylor Scott and White Health
In this brief discourse, we will explore with the Swedish philosopher, Fredrik Svenaeus, who has proposed a “philosophy of medical practice” based on the phenomenological and hermeneutical writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which in turn is a development of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics as expounded in his classic work, Sein und Zeit. Svenaeus argues that health is more than the absence of disease as implied by the biomedical model; it is a phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world in which the healthy person feels “at home.” Illness, by contrast, is the sense of alienation, of “un-home-likeness” where the ill person’s experiences feel unfamiliar and distressing. Svenaeus suggests that medical practice, and particularly primary care is not simply a scientific endeavor characterized by the epistemological search for biological abnormality, rather it is hermeneutical in the sense that the clinician aims to give meaning to the patient’s “un-home-like” experience by integrating it with her own medical experience.
Pastoral care givers intuitively know that health is more than the absence of disease as implied by the biomedical model. To hone in the metaphor of illness as un-home-likeness, we will trace H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind, to talk about illness as much more than a mutation or an anomaly explained through biology or chemicals alone. We will argue that health is not a state or process, but a relationship premised on how we connect with the world and entailing how we perceive the world from one direction and experience it in return. Health is the holistic and ontological phenomenon of engagement. It is holistic because it is indivisible—change the means of engaging and the experience is changed—and it is ontological because the experience of being entails the bringing together of many dependent factors, what Heidegger refers to as a “web of significance.”
R. Mark Grace, M.Div, ACPES, Chief Mission & Ministry Officer, Baylor Scott and White Health
In this brief discourse, we will explore with the Swedish philosopher, Fredrik Svenaeus, who has proposed a “philosophy of medical practice” based on the phenomenological and hermeneutical writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which in turn is a development of Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological hermeneutics as expounded in his classic work, Sein und Zeit. Svenaeus argues that health is more than the absence of disease as implied by the biomedical model; it is a phenomenological experience of being-in-the-world in which the healthy person feels “at home.” Illness, by contrast, is the sense of alienation, of “un-home-likeness” where the ill person’s experiences feel unfamiliar and distressing. Svenaeus suggests that medical practice, and particularly primary care is not simply a scientific endeavor characterized by the epistemological search for biological abnormality, rather it is hermeneutical in the sense that the clinician aims to give meaning to the patient’s “un-home-like” experience by integrating it with her own medical experience.
Pastoral care givers intuitively know that health is more than the absence of disease as implied by the biomedical model. To hone in the metaphor of illness as un-home-likeness, we will trace H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind, to talk about illness as much more than a mutation or an anomaly explained through biology or chemicals alone. We will argue that health is not a state or process, but a relationship premised on how we connect with the world and entailing how we perceive the world from one direction and experience it in return. Health is the holistic and ontological phenomenon of engagement. It is holistic because it is indivisible—change the means of engaging and the experience is changed—and it is ontological because the experience of being entails the bringing together of many dependent factors, what Heidegger refers to as a “web of significance.”