A review of "The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying" by Jeffrey P. Bishop

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Notes

¹ Bishop presents George Engel as holding that science itself is not reductive, but medicine became reductive under the influence of Christian dualism (234). Bishop himself argues that medicine's dualism of person and bodily machine is “a more subtle form of dualism than any Christian dualism of body and soul” (183). This still does not make clear whether Bishop agrees that the troubles originate within medicine itself or in modern science generally.

² The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 17. The quoted text belongs to a rhetorically complicated description (during the second meditation) of what Descartes used to believe. The conception of bodily nature that emerges from the conclusion of the text is cognitively stripped of formal and final causes, knowable with certainty only in its quantitative dimensions, mechanical in its motions, and neutral with respect to distinctions between health and disease. Descartes anticipated that this conception of nature would lead to medical power (see the sixth part of his Discourse on Method). What Bishop shows us of Bernard is Cartesianism in its medical infancy.

³ See President's Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Defining Death: Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981), 56–58. The report almost always uses the phrase brain death in quotation marks.