The Christian Ethics of Knowing the Patient: The Logic of Dissection and the Logic of Incarnation
Kimbell Kornu, MD, PhD, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

The doing of Christian medical ethics typically follows the two-fold process of knowledge and application, theory and practice. However, such a conception assumes that truth and goodness are separable. In contrast, medical practice provides a concrete model that the way of knowing already assumes an ethical stance. For example, a technically competent physician can harm a patient’s dignity by treating the patient as an object, not a person. Drawing on the history of medical epistemology, theological metaphysics, and clinical practice, this paper will critically compare two ways of knowing: (1) the logic of dissection, which entails taking the object of inquiry, cutting it up, and reducing it into parts, which is paradigmatic for the modern way of knowing; and (2) the logic of incarnation, which encounters the object of inquiry on its own terms as an integrated whole. The logic of dissection actively forces the invisible to become visible, as demonstrated by Aristotle and Galen, while the logic of incarnation receptively allows the visible to reveal the invisible, as embodied by Maximus the Confessor and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. One implication is that knowing is an ethical act: how we know a thing is a kind of stance towards it. A physician can “know” a patient by deploying the logic of dissection in mentally cutting her up into cells and tissues and organs and explain their totality via mechanisms of action at the expense of their lived experience. While this describes an important dimension to scientific medicine, treating a patient purely as a medical object defaces her human personhood. The ethical failure of the logic of dissection is that it totalizes the patient as a medical object made completely visible, not a person whose most important dimensions are invisible yet knowable, such as their desires, their loves, and their relationships. Approaching the patient with the logic of incarnation entails the importance of embodiment for knowing and wonder towards the patient. The logic of incarnation will know how to use dissection in the service of healing the patient as person, not reducing the patient into an object. The logic of incarnation uses what I call iconic perception over against the dissective medical gaze. But the logics of dissection and incarnation are not only operative in medicine but are generalized ways of knowing that apply in all fields of inquiry such as neuroscience and art history.