Category: Health and Medicine
Prudence, Paranoia, and Loving Our Neighbor
“Will a surplus Russian gas mask protect me from coronavirus, or should I buy an actual respirator?” These are the questions we ponder on social media in the year of our Lord 2020. Three weeks into the United States’ experience...
Our Lives or Our Freedoms: The Fear of Tyranny in a Time of Pandemic
There’s a famous scene in the movie, Braveheart, a 1995 film that became something of a classic among embattled Christian conservatives who liked to see our own battle with “Big Government” in the romanticized terms of a Scottish epic. Riding...
The Ethics of Healthcare Rationing
The call comes in the middle of my clinic session at the hospital in rural Kenya where I work. I apologize to the patient in front of me and answer my phone. It’s the emergency department at the hospital in...
Against An Economy Financed by Human Bodies
By Andreas Vesalius During my teenage years, I experienced periods of intense disdain for my physicality. In becoming fully aware of my sexuality and my existence as a sexual being, I came to oppose such an existence. I envied the...
Book Review: Between Life and Death by Kathryn Butler
In their indispensable book Reclaiming the Body, Joel Shuman and Brian Volck recall a course on literature and medicine taught to 4th-year medical students. Students were asked to describe how they hoped to die with essays, and the results were...
Faithful Suffering and Medicine After “The Baconian Project”
By John Brewer Eberly, Jr., MD and Ben Frush, MD We recently published a case commentary in the AMA Journal of Ethics titled, “What Should Physicians and Chaplains Do When a Patient Believes God Wants Him to Suffer?” which has us...