In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by a (...) thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

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)

In Jeffrey P. Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse it is argued that the dead body has become epistemologically normative in contemporary medicine. In order to regain the communal bonds necessary for the responsive encounter with the other, medicine is in need of living traditions. This leads Bishop to question whether only theology can save medicine. The present essay takes up on this question with a reply from a Bonhoefferian anthropology, arguing for the embodied human being as being-there-with-others and shows how this (...) is Christologically shaped. The broader aim of the essay is to contribute to the debate on embodiment in theological bioethics. The essay maintains a normative understanding of the corporeal reality of what it means to be human and yet argues that this must always be understood in connection with the responsive relation to the other. (shrink)

The article begins with a summary of Jeffrey Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse. Bishop traces the malady of contemporary medicine to its reliance on the corpse as the “epistemologically normative body” and its “metaphysics of efficient causation.” He displays care for the dying as symptomatic of medicine’s malady. He closes the book with the provocative question of whether “only theology can save medicine.” The article then turns to the theology of John Calvin as a possible resource for the re-imagining of medicine, (...) for the revision of its epistemology and metaphysics, and for reforming care for the dying. Calvin’s epistemology, as developed by “Reformed epistemology,” is examined as a response to medicine’s epistemology and metaphysics. Four points are emphasized: 1) that faith is knowledge, that there is no divide between faith and knowledge; 2) that faith’s knowledge is properly basic, providing the context and standard for all knowing; 3) that faith’s knowledge is intimately related to the moral life; and 4) that faith’s knowledge is therapeutic for medicine’s malady and can provide remedies for what Bishop regards as symptomatic of its malady. (shrink)