Medicine and the Saints

Medicine and the Saints PDF Author: Ellen J. Amster
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
The colonial encounter between France and Morocco in the late nineteenth century took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

Medicine and the Saints

Medicine and the Saints PDF Author: Ellen J. Amster
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745443
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book Here

Book Description
The colonial encounter between France and Morocco in the late nineteenth century took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor's murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

Medicine and the Saints

Medicine and the Saints PDF Author: Ellen J. Amster
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292754817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
The colonial encounter between France and Morocco took place not only in the political realm but also in the realm of medicine. Because the body politic and the physical body are intimately linked, French efforts to colonize Morocco took place in and through the body. Starting from this original premise, Medicine and the Saints traces a history of colonial embodiment in Morocco through a series of medical encounters between the Islamic sultanate of Morocco and the Republic of France from 1877 to 1956. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources in both French and Arabic, Ellen Amster investigates the positivist ambitions of French colonial doctors, sociologists, philologists, and historians; the social history of the encounters and transformations occasioned by French medical interventions; and the ways in which Moroccan nationalists ultimately appropriated a French model of modernity to invent the independent nation-state. Each chapter of the book addresses a different problem in the history of medicine: international espionage and a doctor’s murder; disease and revolt in Moroccan cities; a battle for authority between doctors and Muslim midwives; and the search for national identity in the welfare state. This research reveals how Moroccans ingested and digested French science and used it to create a nationalist movement and Islamist politics, and to understand disease and health. In the colonial encounter, the Muslim body became a seat of subjectivity, the place from which individuals contested and redefined the political.

Health and Medicine Among the Latter-day Saints

Health and Medicine Among the Latter-day Saints PDF Author: Lester E. Bush
Publisher: Crossroad Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A fascinating introduction to the "quintessential American religion" by a Mormon doctor and scholar. Bush addresses 10 key themes from the Mormon point of view--dying, passages, well-being, healing, suffering, madness, sexuality, caring, dignity, and morality--as well as healing practices and the Mormon health code.

Medical Saints

Medical Saints PDF Author: Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199743177
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book is an exploration of illness and healing experiences in contemporary society through the veneration of saints: primarily the twin doctors Saints Cosmas and Damian. It also follows the author's personal journey from her role as a hematologist who inadvertently served as an expert witness in a miracle to her research as a historian on the origins, meaning and functions of saints. Sources include interviews with devotees in both North America and Europe. Cosmas and Damian were martyred around the year 300 A.D. in what is now Syria. Called the "Anargyroi" (without silver) because they charged no fees, they became patrons of medicine, surgery, and pharmacy as their cult spread widely across Europe. The near eastern origin explains their popularity in Byzantine and Orthodox traditions and the concentration of their shrines in Eastern Europe, Southern Italy, and Sicily. The Medici family of Florence also viewed the "santi medici" as patrons, and their deeds were depicted by great Renaissance artists. In medical literature they are now revered as patrons of transplantation. Duffin's research focuses on how people have taken the saints with them as they moved within Italy and beyond. It also shows that their veneration is not confined to immigrant traditions, and that it fills important functions in health care and healing. Duffin's conclusions are situated within scholarship in medicine, medical history, sociology, anthropology, and popular religion; and intersect with the current medical debate over spiritual healing. This work springs from medical history and Roman Catholic traditions; however, it extends to general observations about the behaviors of sick people and about the formal responses to individual illness from collectivities in religion, medicine, and, indeed, history.

Not All of Us Are Saints

Not All of Us Are Saints PDF Author: David Hilfiker
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 080907401X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The story of what it means for a middle-class white male physician to confront the health problems of ravaged ghetto communities.

Medical Miracles

Medical Miracles PDF Author: Jacalyn Duffin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019533650X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Modern culture tends to separate medicine and miracles, but their histories are closely intertwined. The Roman Catholic Church recognizes saints through canonization based on evidence that they worked miracles, as signs of their proximity to God. Physicianhistorian Jacalyn Duffin has examined Vatican sources on 1400 miracles from six continents and spanning four centuries. Overwhelmingly the miracles cited in canonizations between 1588 and 1999 are healings, and the majority entail medical care and physician testimony. These remarkable records contain intimate stories of illness, prayer, and treatment, as told by people who rarely leave traces: peasants and illiterates, men and women, old and young. A woman's breast tumor melts away; a man's wounds knit; a lame girl suddenly walks; a dead baby revives. Suspicious of wishful thinking or na ve enthusiasm, skeptical clergy shaped the inquiries to identify recoveries that remain unexplained by the best doctors of the era. The tales of healing are supplemented with substantial testimony from these physicians. Some elements of the miracles change through time. Duffin shows that doctors increase in number; new technologies are embraced quickly; diagnoses shift with altered capabilities. But other aspects of the miracles are stable. The narratives follow a dramatic structure, shaped by the formal questions asked of each witness and by perennial reactions to illness and healing. In this history, medicine and religion emerge as parallel endeavors aimed at deriving meaningful signs from particular instances of human distress -- signs to explain, alleviate, and console in confrontation with suffering and mortality. A lively, sweeping analysis of a fascinating set of records, this book also poses an exciting methodological challenge to historians: miracle stories are a vital source not only on the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people, but also on medical science and its practitioners.

Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics

Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics PDF Author: Courtney S. Campbell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197538533
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics provides the first comprehensive treatment of principles and positions on questions of bioethics encountered by members, professionals, and ecclesiastical leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon). The book addresses three fundamental features of a coherent religious bioethics: precepts for practical decision-making, general ethical principles, and core religious convictions that give a distinctive motivation for personal, communal, and professional integrity. LDS ethical principles of love, hospitality to strangers, covenantal solidarity, justice, and moral agency are integrated with central topics in bioethics including abortion, genetic testing and enhancements, in vitro fertilization, medical assisted death, medicinal marijuana, neonatal intensive care, organ donation, preventive health care, universal access to care, and vaccinations. This book uses first-person experiences to give voice to the lived moral realities of Latter-day Saints as they experience difficult and wrenching ethical questions and choices as persons, family members, community members, professionals, and as citizens within the context of their distinctive faith convictions. It situates these communal conversations within the broader discourse of bioethics and thereby supports both bioethics and religious literacy. Mormonism, Medicine, and Bioethics also examines circumstances in which The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints engages in a moral witness of its values on matters of public policy, such as legalization of physician-assisted death, of elective abortion, and of medicinal marijuana. The book concludes with a distinctive normative argument on why LDS ethical principles and practices require support of universal access to an adequate level of health care for all persons. It provides an appendix of significant LDS ecclesiastical policies on medical, health, and moral issues, making it a definitive educational and reference compilation.

Medicine and Religion

Medicine and Religion PDF Author: Gary B. Ferngren
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421412160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Explores the interplay of medicine and religion in Western societies. Medicine and Religion is the first book to comprehensively examine the relationship between medicine and religion in the Western tradition from ancient times to the modern era. Beginning with the earliest attempts to heal the body and account for the meaning of illness in the ancient Near East, historian Gary B. Ferngren describes how the polytheistic religions of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome and the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have complemented medicine in the ancient, medieval, and modern periods. Ferngren paints a broad and detailed portrait of how humans throughout the ages have drawn on specific values of diverse religious traditions in caring for the body. Religious perspectives have informed both the treatment of disease and the provision of health care. And, while tensions have sometimes existed, relations between medicine and religion have often been cooperative and mutually beneficial. Religious beliefs provided a framework for explaining disease and suffering that was larger than medicine alone could offer. These beliefs furnished a theological basis for a compassionate care of the sick that led to the creation of the hospital and a long tradition of charitable medicine. Praise for Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity, by Gary B. Ferngren "This fine work looks forward as well as backward; it invites fuller reflection of the many senses in which medicine and religion intersect and merits wide readership."—JAMA "An important book, for students of Christian theology who understand health and healing to be topics of theological interest, and for health care practitioners who seek a historical perspective on the development of the ethos of their vocation."—Journal of Religion and Health

Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages

Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: Jenni Kuuliala
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789462983373
Category : Canonization
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Bodily suffering and patient, Christlike attitudes towards that suffering were among the key characteristics of sainthood throughout the medieval period. Saints, Infirmity, and Community in the Late Middle Ages analyses the meanings given to putative saints' bodily infirmities in late medieval canonization hearings. How was an individual saint's bodily ailment investigated in the inquests, and how did the witnesses (re)construct the saintly candidates' ailments? What meanings were given to infirmity when providing proofs for holiness? This study depicts holy infirmity as an aspect of sanctity that is largely defined within the community, in continual dialogue with devotees, people suffering from doubt, the holy person, and the cultural patterns ascribed to saintly life. Furthermore, it analyses how the meanings given to saints' infirmities influenced and reflected society's attitudes towards bodily ailments -- or dis/ability -- in general.

Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity

Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity PDF Author: Gary B. Ferngren
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421420066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Drawing on New Testament studies and recent scholarship on the expansion of the Christian church, Gary B. Ferngren presents a comprehensive historical account of medicine and medical philanthropy in the first five centuries of the Christian era. Ferngren first describes how early Christians understood disease. He examines the relationship of early Christian medicine to the natural and supernatural modes of healing found in the Bible. Despite biblical accounts of demonic possession and miraculous healing, Ferngren argues that early Christians generally accepted naturalistic assumptions about disease and cared for the sick with medical knowledge gleaned from the Greeks and Romans. Ferngren also explores the origins of medical philanthropy in the early Christian church. Rather than viewing illness as punishment for sins, early Christians believed that the sick deserved both medical assistance and compassion. Even as they were being persecuted, Christians cared for the sick within and outside of their community. Their long experience in medical charity led to the creation of the first hospitals, a singular Christian contribution to health care. "A succinct, thoughtful, well-written, and carefully argued assessment of Christian involvement with medical matters in the first five centuries of the common era . . . It is to Ferngren's credit that he has opened questions and explored them so astutely. This fine work looks forward as well as backward; it invites fuller reflection of the many senses in which medicine and religion intersect and merits wide readership."—Journal of the American Medical Association "In this superb work of historical and conceptual scholarship, Ferngren unfolds for the reader a cultural milieu of healing practices during the early centuries of Christianity."—Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith "Readable and widely researched . . . an important book for mission studies and American Catholic movements, the book posits the question of what can take its place in today's challenging religious culture."—Missiology: An International Review Gary B. Ferngren is a professor of history at Oregon State University and a professor of the history of medicine at First Moscow State Medical University. He is the author of Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction and the editor of Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction.