opinion
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Notes on the book “Twice Dead” by Margaret Lock
This book presents an extensive review of the history and development of one of the most controversial medical practices – organ transplants. In fact, it would be fair to say that the book is not really about organ transplants but about the reinvention of death in the relatively new term “brain death”. Lock describes the making of this term, it’s popularization, the debates that surround it, and its cultural impact. Having worked for another project in Japan, Lock had an opportunity to research the issue of brain death there. This book provides a sort of comparison between the way the topic is approached in North America and in Japan. We…
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Thoughts on “Capitalist spirituality” – a term offered by J. Carrette and R. King
– a term offered in Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion by J. Carrette and R. King In their book Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that the replacement of tradition-specific religion with a more free-form search for personal meaning has resulted in a sort of a vacuum that called for a new search for meaning, which in turn has been filled by branding. They describe this tendency as consumerist spirituality that promises the quick fixes, easy achievable states without much commitment or work done. The authors argue that the main problem with modern spiritualities is that they are not demanding enough,…
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Notes on “Midrash and Medicine. Healing Body and Soul in the Jewish Interpretive tradition”
The book is a collection of essays and articles that present the views of some of the most sensitive people to the ideas of jewish cultural tradition of midrash within the healthcare settings. The book is divided into themes, within each of them two different people present their perspective views on the given subject. These are not always the opposite views, I would rather call them complementary of each other. For example, in the first pair essays exploring the use of metaphors in the healing process both Rabbi Simka Y. Weintraub and Stuart Schoffman describe the use of metaphors in understanding of one’s illness and in accessing the healings. While…
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Notes on the book by Fazlur Rahman “Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition”
In his book Fazlur Rahman provides a thorough exploration of the way medicine had grown and had been used in the Islamic world. To do this he begins with the introduction to the history of Islam. Throughout this book we find that the relationship between Islam and medicine has been complex and uneven and it continues to be this way in our times. To understand this relationship the author provides a clear explanation of a Muslim point of view on the topics related to illness and medicine and historical facts that have influenced these views, such as general fatalism of the adepts of Islam and the orthodox anti-intellectualism. At the…
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Notes on “Health and Long Life The Chinese Way”
a book by Livia Kohn This book is a comprehensive guide through the Chinese system of viewing the person in the Universe. It is written in a very structured way, so that even those who are unfamiliar with the numerous words and concepts do not get confused and are able to grasp the idea of the Chinese view. The body in Chinese health and long life practices is a constantly moving and changing combination of different forms of Qi (life energy). The organs within the body are classified according to the five phases which correspond with the seasons and the Five elements, such as Wood, Metal, Earth, Water, and Fire.…
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Notes on the book by Amanda Porterfield “Healing in the History of Christianity”
In this book Amanda Porterfield describes the course of the history of the healing traditions within Christian religion. In other words, she studies the history of Christianity through the prism of healing within it, and it works just right due to the fact that, as we find out, healing has always been central to the Christian faith. We are taken through the history of Christian thought and approaches starting from Jesus and ending with modern Christianity, and we see how the ideas of healing had changed within it, as, for example, the move inspired by Calvin from firm belief in the miracles of healing related to saints to the idea…
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Notes on the book “Modern and Global Ayurveda : Pluralism and Paradigms”
Modern and Global Ayurveda is a collection of papers presented at a 2004 conference convened by the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research at the University of Cambridge edited by Dagmar Wujastyk, an independent scholar in Indology at the University of Bonn and Frederick M. Smith, Professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions at the University of Iowa. This book briefly touches the history of Ayurveda and then explores in detail its development in the modern times, its coexistence with classical western medicine, the ideological differences between the “ancient” and modern ways of teaching and practice, its growth in the West and it’s new appearance back in India. In other…
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Notes on article by N. E. Conner and L. S. Eller “Spiritual perspectives, needs and nursing interventions of Christian African–Americans”
The article concludes that “the potential for spiritual care to influence both the psychological and physiological health of patients either directly or indirectly speaks to the urgency of providing patients with appropriate spiritual assessment and interventions” (631). I found this to be the most important part of the article, because while the authors had chosen to explore one subgroup as an example of the spiritual needs of the patients, this conclusion refers to all patients. “Respondents also wrote in their need for nurses to pray with and share personal beliefs with them. We found that 41% of desired spiritual nursing interventions were related to nurses’ direct participation in spiritual activities,…
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Notes on the case study by T. Borneman, O. Klein, J. Thomas, B. Ferrel “Spiritual Care for Jewish Patients Facing a Life Threatening Illness”
The article is a case study of a 65 year old lady diagnosed with end-stage lung cancer, who is Jewish by birth but who does not share the Jewish religious beliefs. We are shown some of the challenges that chaplains and physicians would need to face in working with Jewish patients. The quote below summarized the main idea of the article (case study): “[This case] illustrates the great differences in belief among jews and demonstrates that clinicians and chaplains cannot make assumptions based on a patient’s self-identification as Jewish”(p.61). We see that there is no one right way to deal with Jewish patients, just as there is not one particular…
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Notes on the case study by E. Li and C. Wen “Should the Confucian Family-Determination Model Be Rejected?”
This article describes a case that happened in a hospital in China, when a young lady on the 9th month of pregnancy came in and was diagnosed with severe pneumonia, followed by a sharp drop in cardiopulmonary function and general edema, and soon after arriving at the hospital went into coma. The doctors considered cesarian section as the optimal solution to save the lives of the mother and the baby, but the father of the child did not give his permission for the surgery, and the other relatives of the woman were hard to reach. Because the surgery had been postponed until the hospital could have consent from the family…