Book Review
Can These Bones Live?
The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying
by Jeffrey P. Bishop
University of Notre Dame Press, 2011
(410 pages, $35.00, paperback)
reviewed by Raymond Barfield
Jeffrey Bishop is a physician and a philosopher, and only someone who is both could have written this book. The Anticipatory Corpse is a diagnosis of medicine's malady, and unfortunately Dr. Bishop has some bad news for us: "There is something rotten at the heart of medicine" (22). Bad news about a disease can be hard to take, but it can also be a relief to see more clearly what is actually wrong, and this was certainly my experience of reading the book as a physician.
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Raymond Barfield is Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Christian Philosophy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he directs the Pediatric Quality of Life and Palliative Care Program, and a new Duke initiative called Theology, Medicine and Culture. He is the author of The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press) and a forthcoming book of poetry called Life in the Blind Spot.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on medicine from the online archives
33.3—May/June 2020
on the Wisdom of the Good Doctor Edmund Pellegrino by Allen H. Roberts II
more from the online archives
32.5—September/October 2019
Some Trivial Thoughts on the Study of Philosophy by Graeme Hunter
22.6—July/August 2009
on a Noble Defense Doomed by Darwinian Materialism by John G. West
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
