Souls at Work: A Critical Reflection on Physicianship and Patienthood
Ashley Moyse, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and McDonald Scholar in the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. He is also a research fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford
The soul doesn't sit beneath the skin as an alien ‘other’. It is, rather, the 'vital breath the converts biological matter into an animated body' (F. Berardi). The soul, as Spinoza suggests, is what the body can do. Such thinking opposes a notion where body and soul are self-contained and qualitatively different phenomena. It suggests, rather, that any discourse about the body is, coinherently, to be about the soul—and vice versa (K. Barth; E. L. Mascall). Thus, thinking of soul-and-body, the paper will explore not only physicianship but also patienthood as animated bodily phenomena.
Studying the encounter between the physician and patient, that being the encounter between animated bodies (what the corresponding bodies can and cannot do), will be introduced as its ground and the practices of good medicine will prove healing for both patient and physician. Yet such study will also be set within and be dissenting of the passionate and persistent rationalities incumbent to modern medicine that cleave the coinherence of body and soul, disciplining ways of saying and seeing bodies and souls in dualities that prove corrosive. Such corrosion leaves physicians and patients vulnerable to objectification, instrumentalization, and bureaucratization that correspond to technological and economic (or market) ‘states of being’ (Sergei Bulgakov), which demean the goods of medicine as they contrive the ‘work’ of both physicians and patients.
Studying the encounter between the physician and patient, that being the encounter between animated bodies (what the corresponding bodies can and cannot do), will be introduced as its ground and the practices of good medicine will prove healing for both patient and physician. Yet such study will also be set within and be dissenting of the passionate and persistent rationalities incumbent to modern medicine that cleave the coinherence of body and soul, disciplining ways of saying and seeing bodies and souls in dualities that prove corrosive. Such corrosion leaves physicians and patients vulnerable to objectification, instrumentalization, and bureaucratization that correspond to technological and economic (or market) ‘states of being’ (Sergei Bulgakov), which demean the goods of medicine as they contrive the ‘work’ of both physicians and patients.