Abstracts
“In The Spirit of Men
There is no Blood”: Descartes’ Physiological Writings
and the De-sacralisation of the Body
Richard Paul Hamilton
Much recent scholarship on Descartes has focussed upon the integral
role of his scientific work in his overall corpus, resulting in
a much richer view of his entire philosophical project. Central
to that scientific work was a lifelong interest in physiology
and the conceptual work of drawing out the implications of the
new anatomy. Throughout his intellectual career Descartes wrestled
with the Philosophical, Theological and Ethical Implications of
treating the human body as “just like any other body in
the universe”. Traditionally, in discussions of the rise
of the mechanistic conception of the body, Descartes is treated
as the villain of the piece. In this paper, however, I will argue
that towards the end of his life, partly under the influence of
Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, he had come to see the ultimate
futility of a thoroughgoing reductionism in physiology. In The
Passions of the Soul Descartes resorts to a range of normative
explanations for organic function that violate his earlier methodological
commitments. While this could be treated as simple inconsistency,
I will suggest a more charitable reading, in which Descartes,
in attempting to do justice to the phenomenon of embodiment, begins
to develop a much more interesting account of mind-body relations
than the traditional substance dualist reading would suggest.
While my argument has obvious implications for the history of
medicine, I will also attempt to draw out some of the contemporary
lessons that can be learned from Descartes’ abandonment
of reductionism in physiology.
“Beyond Description”:
Religious and Medical Representations of Breast Cancer in Seventeenth-Century
France
Therese Taylor
This paper would give an historical perspective on the relationship
between religious and medical accounts of terminal illness.
In 1666, Anne of Austria, the Queen Mother of France, died of
breast cancer. Her death was marked by the appearance of an unusually
large number of obituaries that discussed her terminal illness.
These texts from Catholic culture will be compared to the medical
texts of the time, which also sought to define and explain the
process of disease and death. Breast cancer, in particular, was
a traumatic disease which challenged onlookers required to negotiate
memory and create a meaningful narrative.
Discussion of this case shows, from an historical perspective,
how religion and science contended in the era just before the
Enlightenment. The paper will also discuss what aspects of a woman’s
experience of breast cancer were suppressed and denied by male
writers – whether clerical or medical. The paper will suggest
that during this era it was religious, rather than medical, texts
which offered more realistic depictions of breast cancer.
Painful Paradoxes: Consumption,
Sacrifice and Man-Building in the Age of Nationalism
Christopher E. Forth
This paper examines several discourses relating to the intersection
between male bodies and the constitution of the nation as a quasi-sacred
being. It probes a series of tensions between emerging concepts
of ‘civilization’ and anxieties about manhood as they
were articulated by physicians and health reformers in Britain,
France and Germany around 1800. It shows how, in an age of escalating
international tensions, moralists and physicians argued that modern
civilization’s emphases on material comfort, cerebral professions
and sedentary lifestyles crafted men who were unacquainted with
the habits of austerity and endurance that would enable them to
defend the nation in times of crisis. Bringing René Girard’s
theory of sacred sacrifice to bear on discourses of early nationalism,
the paper proposes that, through the military and physical culture
initiatives proposed at the time, measured doses of ‘pain’
were prescribed to men as forms of hygiene that would effect a
‘regeneration through violence’ of both male bodies
and the nation as a whole. What is sometimes called ‘the
ultimate sacrifice’ for the nation had to first be carried
out on the level of the private male body, thus instantiating
what Ana María Alonso calls ‘the fusion of the ideological
and the sensory’ in the construction of national bodies.
Paradigm Switching: Medical
Intuition in a Postmodern Society
Ruth Barcan
This paper is a study of spiritual/psychic healing and medical
intuition (the use of clairvoyance for medical purposes). It describes
the existence of a quasi-clandestine yet publicly available network
of sacred healing practices and its relationship with mainstream
medicine. These practices are both widespread and hidden, legal
yet outside medical regulation, sacred, yet also recreational,
consumerist and medical. They are based on the antithesis of a
number of core principles ostensibly underpinning western medicine,
supplanting rationalism and empiricism with notions such as intuition,
the “gift,” and spiritual guidance. And yet they nonetheless
operate in a relationship with orthodox medicine that is much
more complex than simple oppositionality.
Drawing on interviews with practitioners (clairvoyants, medical
psychics, spiritual healers), this paper explores the conceptual
basis of these practices (i.e. the models of the body that underpin
them), technical aspects (what do medical psychics actually see?)
and the social functioning of these hidden networks that operate
alongside western biomedicine. It poses questions about what happens
when people move between radically disparate medical practices,
as most users of alternative medicine do. What happens when a
person moves between, say, the GP’s office and the psychic
healer? Do they switch, overlay or combine the very different
paradigms on which each practice is based? Do they tell their
doctor that they are “complementing” antibiotics with
spiritual healing?
Subtle Anatomy: The Bio-metaphysics of
Alternative Therapies
Jay Johnston
This paper will examine the Subtle Body as an embodied interface
between the religious/spiritual and the biological, and will discuss
the types of medical 'intervention' elicited by this conceptualisation
of embodiment. In western culture, familiarity with subtle body
schemes is increasing with the flourishing of alternative health
practices, especially Traditional Chinese Medicine, Yoga disciplines
and spiritual healing practices. Found in a variety of forms in
Eastern, Western and Esoteric philosophy/religion, the concept
of Subtle Bodies proposes the individual as comprised of an invisible
energetic 'anatomy.'
This paper will consider how Subtle Bodies (and the biological
body from which it cannot be separated) are treated — both
conceptually and practically — within the framework of energetic
medicine (from a western Spiritualist tradition) and TCM. It will
be particularly concerned with the Subtle Body as a biological-spiritual
interface that requires a radically different conceptualisation
of the body, ontology and what is understood to be and constitute
medicine.
Contested Sites: Aboriginal Health
engaging Western Medicine
Brian F McCoy, La Trobe University & Gregory Phillips, University
of Melbourne
Despite many predictions that traditionalist healing practice
would cease, many Aboriginal peoples continue to engage a world
of health and sickness very different from that understood by
western medical health care. This presentation draws on recent
research amongst people of the south-east Kimberley desert region
as they describe what it means to be well, and also by research
from a North Queensland Aboriginal community concerning addictions,
trauma and healing.
Both pieces of research describe the work of local healers, understandings
of sickness and healing, and key cultural values. These cultural
values impact on the human and social body as they engage in historical,
generational and contemporary contexts.
A challenge continues to exist for western medical health care
in its understanding, respecting and engaging the physical, social,
and spiritual Aboriginal ‘body’.
Different Medical Bodies and
Knowledge(s): a Re-consideration of Refugee Health Care
Judy Singer
Refugees come to Australia from a diverse range of cultures.
Many have been subjected to severe physical and/or psychological
torture because of their ethnicity, political beliefs or religious
affiliations. Such traumatic experiences devastate body, mind
and soul, causing symptoms that cannot be neatly classified as
wholly physical, psychological or spiritual. Addressing the complexity
of torture and its effects, requires a multidisciplinary approach
that respects the diverse range of healing practices in other
cultures which lie outside the biomedical model. In response to
the imperative to move beyond only a biomedical approach within
refugee health care, the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of
Torture (VFST) incorporates naturopathy, in the form of herbal
medicine and massage therapies, into its service delivery.
Based on the stories told by refugee women of their experiences
of naturopathy which is deemed a ‘Western traditional medicine’,
this paper will consider the value and place of traditional knowledge(s)
in negotiating the sacred in a cross-cultural context. Through
their stories, the women transform the generic image of the ‘marginalised,
traumatised, dislocated refugee’ into the ‘embodied,
wise woman’. Their stories are set at the interface between
biomedical discourse, which privileges ‘expert’ scientific
knowledge, and naturopathy, where ‘local’ subjective
knowledge of the body is highly valued. This is a core site in
which cross-cultural differences of meaning about health and illness
can be explored.
Moments of Grace and Blessing:
Rites and Rituals in the Process of Healing
Fr Roy O’Neill
This presentation will investigate the relationship between religious
belief and/or practice and the healing process. Specifically,
it will examine the place of rites and rituals in that process.
The field of investigation is limited to the experience of people
within hospitals. The focus is specific, in that it is ritualisation,
either formal or informal, and not the more generic question of
the impact of intercessory prayer on the outcome of the human
experience of illness. Specifying ritualisation does not rule
out prayer, since prayer is a form of ritual in itself, and often
part of a greater rite or ritual. The focus is more on other ways
in which people respond with ritualistic actions to the chaotic
threats of human illness, and how such a response might help in
the process of healing.
This process of healing is other than just a physical recovery
from illness. Healing is the holistic integration of the entire
experience of illness, regardless of the medical outcome. Among
medical professionals there is an increasing recognition that
‘spiritual distress’ is a part of the experience of
illness and is in as much need of ‘healing’ as is
the biomedical, the psychological, the emotional. Research is
confirming what has really been known since the foundation of
medicine. Religious faith and/or the practice of a personal spirituality
does impact on the emotional and physical well being of individuals
and families and, during illness or other painful experiences,
people do turn to their spiritual resources finding them helpful.
In different traditions, rites and rituals, or various ways of
connecting to the sacred, are the expressions of these spiritual
resources.
The basis for my comments is research that I carried out at four
hospitals in Sydney as part of the requirements for a Master of
Ministry degree through the Melbourne College of Divinity in association
with the Melbourne University. As a result of this research, the
positive benefits of acknowledging religious beliefs and practices
as an integral part of an holistic health care protocol in a hospital
or health care facility are revealed. The proactive inclusion
of the spiritual needs of patients in the everyday team management
of cases ultimately improves the quality of care being offered
to patients and their families.
The Body and the World
in Buddhism
Peter G. Friedlander
This paper explores ways in which the relationship between the
body and the world was described in the ancient Buddhist texts
of the Pali cannon and how modern Theravada Buddhist traditions
of South East Asia today visualise the body. On the one hand I
show how in one set of early Buddhist analytical meditation practices,
often now called Insight meditation, the body was investigated
in terms of its physiology, elements and Humours. On the other
hand I show that another set of developmental meditation practices,
often now called-loving kindness meditations, were aimed at transforming
the outer world. The combination of these practices was intended
to create a situation in which conditions in the world were developed
that matched the balanced body and mind developed through the
practice of Insight meditation. The out comes of this in contemporary
Buddhist practice in Asia and the West are I argue profound as
it provides a way in which the Buddhist tradition is able to articulate
a relationship between an individual’s investigation of
their own mind and body and communal Buddhist activity related
to social and environmental engagement.
Who Should Care for the Body?
Jeremy Shearmur
This paper starts by discussing some problems concerning the
sale of kidneys in India and Iran. It is argued that among the
reasons why this has had grim consequences, is that in the cultures
in question, the sale of body parts is stigmatized. Accordingly,
if people are reduced to behaving in this manner, the consequences
for their self-esteem are likely to be grim.
From this, it turns to some cases where people are happy enough
to partially commodify themselves. Examples are given from the
sale of kidneys in some parts of the Philippines, to the sale
of blood plasma by some students in the US.
The paper poses the problem: should we, in such circumstances,
be willing to purchase from people who have such attitudes towards
their bodies? Or, by contrast, should we treat the fact that they
have such attitudes as, itself, problematic? The paper concludes
by widening the issue, to more practical ethics. To what extent
should we treat people as we find them – to deal with them
as they present themselves to us – or to
Regulating the Muslim Body
Roxanne D. Marcotte
In an age of in-vitro fertilization, contraception, abortion,
cosmetic surgery, and transplants of all sorts, troubled and worried
religious Muslims often turn to religious leaders for guidance.
In an age of globalization, technology provides religious Muslims
with online virtual guidance and religious authority. Many Muslim
websites provide believers with online religious legal opinions,
or fatwas. A study of these fatwas can provide insight into normative
Islamic views, proposed by more or less authoritative religious
authorities, about the Muslim body. This study will focus on “authoritative”
English Sunni Muslim web sites that contain online fatwas with
fatwas on a number of issues associated with the Muslim body.
These fatwas often address new contemporary issues, many of which
arise out of the medical context. A study of these fatwas, their
contents, and the authority and/or authoritativeness attached
to individual fatwas, can provide invaluable information about
some of the religious principles that guide these legal opinions,
the notions of “sacredness” and “inviolability”
of the body that are assumed, the maintained or discarded similarities
and/or differences between the bodies of women and men, and the
differences that may exist between the sacredness of the bodies
of Muslim and non Muslims.
Limitations in Death
Philomena Horsley
The corpse embodies a range of iconic meanings: medicine’s
‘dead meat’ is entangled with a cultural body of emotion
and spirit. The performance of hospital autopsies enacts these
meanings, most particularly in the case of ‘limited autopsies’.
In these situations the family imposes limitations on the areas
of the body to be disrupted, or the organs to be removed or retained.
While these restrictions may, in fact, obscure the purpose of
the autopsy – to determine cause of death – they represent
cultural or religious significances important to families.
This paper draws on an ethnography based within the Department
of Anatomical Pathology of a public hospital. As a medical anthropologist
I explored people’s responses to autopsy, including the
interplay of scientific reason and the ‘rationality of emotion’
that inhabits all the players. It utilises my observation of a
limited autopsy - ‘brain only’ - to explore the significance
of this organ in biomedical culture and everyday cultures as the
contested site of ‘person’, ‘reason’ and
the liminalities of life and death.
Günter Von Hagens’s
World of Bodies
Brian Murray
In the mid-1970s the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens developed
“plastination,” a method of preserving animal and
human remains. In the mid 1990s, Von Hagens began decorating and
displaying life-sized human “plastinates” in a continuing
series of “Body Worlds” exhibitions staged in major
cities in Asia, Europe, and North America. Von Hagens’claim
that he is primarily an educator and a “democratizer”
of anatomical knowledge has brought him wide acceptance in the
United States; in fact, in Houston, “Body Worlds”
is partnered with the Baylor University Medical School. This is
striking, for “Body Worlds” breaks long-standing taboos
regarding the treatment of the dead, and would have been unimaginable
in any American city twenty or even fifteen years ago, when a
Midwestern museum’s display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
photographs ignited a sometimes insightful national debate on
art, obscenity, and public decency. In fact, the American press
has largely ignored—or perhaps not even noticed—the
dark, thoroughly materialist vision that informs Von Hagens’show;
no prominent commentator or editorialist has suggested that a
for-profit display of flayed dead people in jocular poses amounts
to “desecration”—a word now oddly reserved for
discussions of flag-burning. “Body Worlds” offers
real insight into the changing values and assumptions that, for
better or worse, now inform the popular culture of the post-Christian
West.
Freezing Sacred Man: Myth, Philosophy,
and Medicine’s Practice of “Curing” Undesirables
Peter Arnds
What connects Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959)
to Nazi medicine, Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy, and a North
German spa town that, as was only recently revealed, served as
a British interrogation center with camp-like conditions right
after Second World War? The Tin Drum is Grass’s literary
treatment of the Nazi ideology of race and eugenics, resulting
in the persecution of asocials as “life unworthy of life,”
their extermination in psychiatric institutions in the Third Reich,
and their marginalization in the Adenauer period. In structure
and content Grass’s novel connects the persecution of degenerate
art to the persecution and extermination of several minority groups:
the physically and mentally handicapped, criminals, homosexuals,
and vagabonds. The persecuted dwarf-protagonist Oskar Matzerath
becomes a central metaphor and voice for these less discussed
minorities that the Nazis targeted. The focus of my paper is on
the cold water bath as a practice meant to discipline bodies into
docile bodies and consolidate the aberrant mind. It was used as
a medical practice in Charenton in order to cure madness (Foucault
in Madness and Civilization) and is a motif that Grass exploits
for his greengrocer Greff who tries to
discipline his perfect Aryan body by taking baths in the icy Baltic
Sea, thus camouflaging his effeminacy and assimilating to Nazi
gender expectations. Ironically, this image then reappears in
a North German spa resort that traditionally focuses on thermal
bath therapy but between 1945-47 uses baths in ice-cold water
as a practice in a cold-war interrogation center set up by the
British troops with the intention to “cure” German
Communists of their “madness,” killing many of them.
Embarking from Grass’s novel, my paper explores this practice
as an image at the interstices of medicine, literature, myth,
philosophy, and cultural theory. As Agamben points out, in the
camps the “state of exception” rules. In this non-place
(Marc Augé) in post-Enlightenment society, human rights
are no longer valid and homo sacer, the marginalized individual,
is reduced to bare life to be killed willy-nilly. What is the
relationship between, on the one hand, the practice of cold-water
treatment in lunatic asylums as a means to consolidate the aberrant
mind and in camp-like settings and, on the other hand, the sacred
and the profane, these two shifting paradigms? In culture, the
sacred is usually associated with an apolline order of things,
while the profane evokes dionysiac disorder. And yet, these dimensions
become blurred in the figure of the madman as both homo sacer
and, in a Bakhtinian sense, an outcast of society associated with
the profane realm. The sacredness of science, of medicine, too
becomes a questionable category if it transgresses its own authority
by perverting into profanity. How does culture in its manifold
appearances reflect historical persecution of purported madness?
What do the migrant picaro of literature, the medieval wolf-man
banished from his community, Nietzsche’s “dionysiac
man,” and Heidegger’s notions of peacelessness and
loss of dwelling in modernity have to do with the persecution
of nomadic groups (Jews and Gypsies) as “wandering germ
carriers” (Ernst Klee) and German communists in a British
postwar camp?
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