14

Uneasy Alliances: The Faith

Factor in Medicine; the

Health Factor in Religion

Anne Harrington

What does medicine have to do with religion, and vice versa? In the
modern era, we have become accustomed to hearing a number of
specific kinds of responses to this question. One of the oldest and
most familiar of these points out that, even though medicine as a
methodology and technology has functioned over the past century as
a highly successful secularizing force in our society, nevertheless ill-
ness and healing remain imperfectly secularized experiences in our
culture. Ill people continue to be tempted by the promises and con-
solations of religion, and doctors should be respectful of that fact.
Pastoral care workers—the argument concludes—thus need to have
a respected, if modest place, in hospital wards. The vision of the re-
lationship between religion and medicine offered is of nonoverlap-
ping spheres of complementary expertise. Pastors have the right to
take care of the soul of the sick person; and they should leave physi-
cians to take care of his or her body.^1
A second, more recent but still familiar argument is more con-
frontational. It suggests that modern medicine not only ignores reli-
gious and spiritual needs; it itself actually functions as a spiritually
corrosive force for many patients. The argument here is that, even
as it has had many dazzling technological successes, one overall ef-
fect of much of modern medicine has been to dehumanize the expe-
rience of illness; turn human suffering into something equivalent to
the breakdown of an automobile; and transform the doctor-patient
relationship into an alienating, objectifying, utilitarian exchange.^2
In 1990, theNew York Timesessayist and literary critic Anatole
Broyard—dying of prostate cancer—wrote a series of moving medi-