Medicine, Religion, and the Body (International Studies in Religion and Society, 11)

This book develops an interdiscplinary as well as cross cultural and historical analyses of the relationship between medicine, religion, and the body. This book explores the ways in which the body is sacred in Western medicine, as well as how this idea is played out in questions of life and death, of the autopsy and of the meanings attributed to illnesses and disease. Ritual and religious modifications to, and limitations on what may be done to the body raise cross cultural issues of great complexity – philosophically and theologically, as well as sociologically - within medicine and for health care practitioners, but also, as a matter of primary concern for the patient. The book explores the ways in which medicine organises the moral and the immoral, the sacred and the profane; how it mediates cultural concepts of the sacred – of the body, of blood and of life and death. Acknowledgments -- Contributors -- 1. The Social And Spiritual Body -- 2. Negotiating Medicine, Healing And Religious Belief -- 3. Virtue, Health And The State -- Bibliography -- Index Edited By Elizabeth Burns Coleman And Kevin White. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.