In The Anticipatory Corpse, Jeffrey Bishop claims that modern medicine has lost formal and final causality as the dead body has become epistemologically normative, and that a singular focus on efficient and material causality has thoroughly distorted modern medical practice. Bishop implies that the renewal of medicine will require its housing in alternate social spaces. This essay critiques both Bishop’s diagnosis and therapy by arguing, first, that alternate social imaginaries, though perhaps marginalized, are already present within the practice of medicine. (...) And second, the essay argues that alternate social imaginaries in medicine can be reclaimed not through separatist communities but in the re-narration of conceptually underdetermined practices. Given Bishop’s invitation for theology to engage medicine, this essay then draws from theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the kind of diagnosis and therapy currently needed, concluding with a contemporary example of how an alternate social imaginary is being instantiated in modern medicine. (shrink)

The point of departure for this essay is the question of why pain is seriously undertreated in the United States. Some kinds of pain (for example, chronic nonmalignant pain) are treated worse than others (acute pain secondary to cancer), but there is excellent evidence that no matter what kind of pain, astonishingly large percentages of pain sufferers are undertreated (Furrow 2001; Hill 1995; Kirou-Mauro et al. 2009; Martino 1998; Morris 1991; NCHS 2006; Resnik, Rehm, and Minard 2001). Although some kinds (...) of pain are difficult to treat, we generally possess the technical armamentarium to significantly ameliorate the vast majority of pain experiences. Yet we do not. And, for as long as anyone in the United States .. (shrink)