Medicine, Machines, and Mourning: The Formation of Physicians and Praying the Psalms

<span class="paragraphSection"><div class="boxTitle">Abstract</div>This paper follows two main arguments. First, using the works of Jeffrey Bishop and Gerald McKenny, is the argument that medicine forms physicians to think of both patients and themselves as machines. Informed by medicine’s epistemological norm, the dead body, life is reduced to a series of mechanisms that resist the stasis of death aided by the efficient control of medicine. The physician is supposedly a neutral and objective scientific machine that harnesses the efficient power of medicine to exert force on the moving matter of the body in an attempt to control or at the very least resist death. The second argument counters the first by arguing for the Christian practice of praying the Psalms. The Psalms resist medicine’s attempted control of death by calling on the God who saves. The language of the Psalms allows medical providers to view themselves and their patients as contingent human beings.</span>

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