Medicine and Religion [Kindle Edition]
Author: Gary B. Ferngren | Language: English | ISBN: B00GTSPDT0 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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
Books with free ebook downloads available Medicine and Religion- File Size: 1514 KB
- Print Length: 256 pages
- Publisher: JHUP (January 17, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GTSPDT0
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #898,749 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
A few years ago, I read The Western Medical Tradition published by Cambridge University Press. While these two massive volumes were very informative, they did not have the impact that Gary Ferngren’s Medicine & Religion: A Historical Introduction had on me. In a little over 200 pages, Ferngren covered all the major epochs where medicine and religion intersect. Ferngren’s book was also a pleasure to read (I had several dozing-off sessions reading The Western Medical Tradition) because the editing job is fantastic. This book should be mandatory reading for seminary and Christian medical students, as well as pastors and Christian healthcare professionals.
In the introduction, Ferngren explains the critical need to interpret medical and religious history in context. We cannot read modern discoveries into the past to try to prove how advanced a culture was (such as some Christian groups do today), nor are we at liberty to assume a discipline like medical science remained static throughout the ages. Rather, we need “contextualism,” writes Ferngren, “an approach that recognizes that all medical ideas and practices, including our own, are shaped by their cultural context” (3).
Moving into the body of Medicine & Religion Ferngren plants the reader in the Near East to consider medical practices in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Hebrews and Israel, and Hellenistic Judaism. He then surveys Greece, starting the reader in the archaic period, moving to the father of medicine Hippocrates in the classical age, the origin of humoral medicine, the devastating plague of Athens described by Thucydides, and concludes with the famed healing cult and temple of the god Asclepius.
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