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curing disease vs. healing illness
Mar. 11th, 2004 08:24 amfrom John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, pp.293-298: (italics in original)
Edit: in retrospect I have decided to crosspost this entry.
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jesusliberation
"A key axiom in medical anthropology is the dichotomy between two aspects of sickness: disease and illness. Disease refers to a malfunctioning of biological and/or psychological processes, while the term illness refers to the psychological experience and meaning of perceived disease." -- Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, p. 72
Scholars working in medical anthropology, comparative ethnomedicine, and the cross-cultural study of "indigenous" healing have proposed a distinction between curing disease and healing illness. ... To further distinguish the two components, we could say that the surgeon is better at curing disease while the shaman is better at healing illness. And that might be all right, of course, if those two processes were always totally separate.
In explaining that distinction to undergraduate students at DePaul University as a background for discussion of Jesus as an indigenous healer, I was usually met with obedient disbelief... until the movie Philadelphia came along.... The protagonist, played by Tom Hanks, had AIDS, a disease caused by a virus that attacks the immune system. This disease may someday be curable.... But the movie was not about the disease, which for Hanks could not be cured, but about the illness, for which healing was possible. The illness involved the man's own reaction to his disease, as well as the reactions of his lover, his family, his employer, his lawyer, and of society at large through the justice system. He was fired by his employer not just because he had AIDS but because he had become infected as a homosexual, and he successfully sued his firm for that discrimination in court. In Philadelphia the distinction between curing disease and healing illness was devastatingly obvious. But so also was the interactive loop between the twin processes of disease and illness. ... That story... showed how one could have successful healing where no successful curing was possible. It also showed how, in other places and times, where curing was not generally possible, healing might still be very important.
... [W]ith some forms of chronic or long-term pain -- especially psychosomatic ailments, where stress or oppression, strain, or exploitation have resulted in somatization or embodiment of the general distress as a specifically localized problem -- supportive companionship can slowly but surely eliminate the disease itself. Rodney Stark, speaking of ancient epidemics, gave the following statistic: "Modern medical experts believe that conscientious nursing without any medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more" (89).
... In 1960 I visited the Roman Catholic healing shrines of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France and at Fatima in Portugal. In 1965 I visited the pagan healing shrines of the god Asklepios at Epidaurus in Greece and at Pergamum in Turkey. I remember being struck by the general similarity between the ailments involved in stories of healing at all those shrines (as well as by ailments whose reminders could be seen: there were many crutches at the back of the grotto at Lourdes, for example, but no prosthetic limbs or empty coffins).
... I have three conclusions so far. First, society and individual, disease and illness, healing and curing always intertwine together, be it delicately or brutally. Second, supportive companionship and/or religious faith can heal illness and, by so doing, even cure disease, but only in certain cases. ... Third, healing stories tend to increase and become more extraordinary rather than decrease and become more banal.
Edit: in retrospect I have decided to crosspost this entry.
crossposted in my journal and crossposted in
jesusliberation
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