Talk on Christianity in Medicine

SUMMARY: What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? In this talk, Dr. Curlin argues that the profession of medicine is caught between two rival accounts of medicine. On what he and Christopher Tollefsen call “the provider of services model”, clinicians eschew any claim to know what is good for a patient and instead offer an array of “health care services” for the sake of the patient’s subjective well-being. Against this trend, Curlin will argue that practitioners should recover what he and Tollefsen call the Way of Medicine, which offers physicians both a path out of the provider of services model and also the moral resources necessary to sustain medicine as a practice devoted to healing. Dr. Curlin will explain the Way of Medicine and consider how Christianity affirms and elevates medicine, rightly understood, as a sacred practice that participates in, without presuming to displace, God’s healing of the world. PRESENTER: Farr Curlin, M.D., is Josiah Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, & History of Medicine and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin has worked to bring attention to the intersection of medicine, ethics, and theology. In 2012 he helped to found both the University of Chicago’s Program on Medicine and Religion and the annual Conference on Medicine and Religion. Since 2015, through Duke Divinity School’s TMC Initiative, he and colleagues have brought graduate theological training to those with vocations to health care. Starting in 2023, Dr. Curlin also is working with colleagues across North America to develop the Hippocratic Society, an association whose mission is forming clinicians in the practice and pursuit of good medicine. He is co-author, with Chris Tollefsen, of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame University Press, 2021), as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters addressing the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice.