288 mind
tations on his experience with the world of high-tech health care that seemed
to many to get to the heart of the matter. “[T]he real narrative of dying now is
that you die in a machine,” he began—and the irony of course was that none
of those machines were going to do Broyard much good, and both he and his
doctors knew it. And yet they—and, in a sense, he—persisted in subjecting
him to one high-tech test after another because in a medical culture where
death means that medicine has “failed” to do its job, then there are no alter-
natives to the ritual of cure. The result, though, was that Broyard as a person—
his experience of illness—was rendered irrelevant and invisible. Musing on
this fact, Broyard wrote:
I wouldn’t demand a lot of my doctor’s time. I just wish he would
brood upon my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would
give me his whole mind at least once, be bonded with me for a brief
space, survey my soul as well as my flesh to get at my illness, for
each man is ill in his own way....Justasheorders blood tests and
bone scans of my body, I’d like my doctor to scan me, to grope for
my spirit as well as my prostate. Without such recognition, I am
nothing but my illness.^3Now: usually the argument that medicine needs to find some way to make
room for the soul as well as the body is made on ethical and existential grounds.
The people who make the argument usually are not part of the medical estab-
lishment but engage with it from one or another outside perspective—as pa-
tients, or pastors, or bioethicists. They disagree on many of the nuances of
their arguments, but by and large all of them tend to agree that a big problem
with medicine today is that it has, so to speak, too much science and too little
soul.
The past ten years, however, have seen the rise of a very different argument
that is beginning to destabilize our accustomed ways of thinking about the
needs of the soul as opposed to those of the body. Advocates of this new ar-
gument begin by declaring that the critics of modern biomedicine are essen-
tially right: modern medicine does need to make more room in its practices
for the life of the soul. But then they make an unfamiliar move. Instead of
blaming modern medicine’s spiritual crisis on its obsession with laboratory
data, they insist that the laboratory actually has vindicated the importance of
the soul in clinical practice. More precisely, they point to new data from epi-
demiology, from clinical trials, and from experimental research that, they say,
strongly suggest that an active religious life can bolster one’s health and mit-
igate the effects of disease. Medicine thus needs to more fully embrace the
soul, they say, but not just because it would be nice to do so (although it would
be), or because patients have a right to their beliefs and it is therefore profes-
sionally advisable to offer them that opportunity (although that is also true). It
needs to do so, rather, simply because religion turns out to begood medicine.