Re-enchanting the Body: Overcoming the Melancholy of Anatomy
Joel Shuman, Ph.D. Professor of Theology, King's College
Among the characteristic prejudices of modernity is the conviction that enquiry proceeds properly by way of analysis, by reducing things to their constitutive parts and studying those parts to understand their respective structures and functions. This is certainly the case with those applied sciences dealing with the human body; the most basic of the medical sciences, anatomy, takes its name from the Greek ana-temnein, “to cut up,” or to dissect. The other medical sciences, from cellular biology to genetics, seem to follow this basic mode.
Analytic thinking has without question produced or had a strong hand in modern medicine’s most salutary achievements. Historians of medicine often mark the publication of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body), the earliest comprehensive human anatomy, as a seminal moment in the evolution of biomedicine. Subsequent developments, from Harvey’s work on the circulatory system to the emergence of microbiology and germ theory to recent advances in medical genetics, are all based in analytic, if not reductionist, thinking. One might ask, however, whether the tendency toward reductionism in the study of the body has been positive without remainder, for the analytic view of the body has become not simply a way of knowing about it, but a way of seeing it that approaches ideology.
The ways women and men speak about and make their way in the world, the lives to which they aspire, and the ways they treat each other and the rest of Creation are all matters of vision, functions of their seeing things in what Iris Murdoch called “the moral sense of seeing.” To see the human body analytically is to see it as thoroughly disenchanted in the Weberian sense; neither simply materialistically, nor even reductionistically, but instrumentally, without inherent meaning and subject to being used for whatever purposes its “owner” or those who otherwise control it deem suitable. As such, the body is variously subject to manipulation, enhancement, exploitation, or the maximization of some form or the other of pleasure, with modern biomedicine being a potential agent in any or all of these.
These unhappy tendencies toward instrumentalizing the body may be resisted by re-enchanting it. To re-enchant the human body is not to “go back” to see it as it was before the development of scientific medicine, nor is it to see it as in any way mystical. Rather, it is to see it for what it is; neither an accumulation of chemical reactions nor the sum of its cellular parts, but the very presence of a human person who exists and must be understood to exist within a complex constellation of other bodies living together, interdependently, in a particular place. Health care professionals who wish to “see” the bodies of their patients rightly must begin precisely here, not as a nostalgic substitute for the analytic account of the body, but as a necessary complement for a craft that has the body’s flourishing as its proper end.
Among the characteristic prejudices of modernity is the conviction that enquiry proceeds properly by way of analysis, by reducing things to their constitutive parts and studying those parts to understand their respective structures and functions. This is certainly the case with those applied sciences dealing with the human body; the most basic of the medical sciences, anatomy, takes its name from the Greek ana-temnein, “to cut up,” or to dissect. The other medical sciences, from cellular biology to genetics, seem to follow this basic mode.
Analytic thinking has without question produced or had a strong hand in modern medicine’s most salutary achievements. Historians of medicine often mark the publication of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body), the earliest comprehensive human anatomy, as a seminal moment in the evolution of biomedicine. Subsequent developments, from Harvey’s work on the circulatory system to the emergence of microbiology and germ theory to recent advances in medical genetics, are all based in analytic, if not reductionist, thinking. One might ask, however, whether the tendency toward reductionism in the study of the body has been positive without remainder, for the analytic view of the body has become not simply a way of knowing about it, but a way of seeing it that approaches ideology.
The ways women and men speak about and make their way in the world, the lives to which they aspire, and the ways they treat each other and the rest of Creation are all matters of vision, functions of their seeing things in what Iris Murdoch called “the moral sense of seeing.” To see the human body analytically is to see it as thoroughly disenchanted in the Weberian sense; neither simply materialistically, nor even reductionistically, but instrumentally, without inherent meaning and subject to being used for whatever purposes its “owner” or those who otherwise control it deem suitable. As such, the body is variously subject to manipulation, enhancement, exploitation, or the maximization of some form or the other of pleasure, with modern biomedicine being a potential agent in any or all of these.
These unhappy tendencies toward instrumentalizing the body may be resisted by re-enchanting it. To re-enchant the human body is not to “go back” to see it as it was before the development of scientific medicine, nor is it to see it as in any way mystical. Rather, it is to see it for what it is; neither an accumulation of chemical reactions nor the sum of its cellular parts, but the very presence of a human person who exists and must be understood to exist within a complex constellation of other bodies living together, interdependently, in a particular place. Health care professionals who wish to “see” the bodies of their patients rightly must begin precisely here, not as a nostalgic substitute for the analytic account of the body, but as a necessary complement for a craft that has the body’s flourishing as its proper end.