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
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