What the COVID Pandemic Teaches Us about the Honored but Humble Role of Medicine | Prof. Farr Curlin

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2020

⏱️ 73 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given at Baylor University on September 24, 2020.

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Speaker Bio:

Farr Curlin is Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities and CoDirector of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin’s ethics scholarship takes up moral questions that are raised by religion-associated differences in physicians’ practices. He is an active palliative medicine physician and holds appointments in both the School of Medicine and the Divinity School, where he is working with colleagues to develop a new interdisciplinary community of scholarship and training focused on the intersection of theology, medicine, and culture.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:04.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamistic institute.org.
0:11.1	The COVID phenomenon has obviously impacted all of our lives, and there's been a lot of thought about it.
0:17.6	And I wanted to just reflect a bit as a physician on what I think I have been struck by during this pandemic, what it has reminded me of.
0:32.1	It's not so much that the pandemic has taught us things that we couldn't have learned otherwise.
0:38.1	But I think it's been a chance to be reminded of things that we can
0:43.8	stop paying as much attention to when things are going along in an apparently
0:49.4	easygoing or untroubled way.
0:54.9	So I thought of seven,
0:57.0	seven things that the COVID pandemic teaches us
0:59.9	about the role of medicine.
1:03.1	And within, or I should say,
1:05.7	connected to medicine,
1:07.2	the place of science and the use of technology and the management of our lives.
1:13.6	And the first is, these aren't in a particular order, but the first is that the pandemic teaches us that medicine is a gift.
1:24.2	St. Basil, back in the fourth century in a little message to the church to a congregation
1:33.9	in something called his long rules, long rule 55, addresses the question of whether it's
1:42.3	fitting for Christians to attend, to go see doctors
1:48.8	when they're sick. The question arises because people wonder, is this somehow not an act of
1:55.8	faith? Should we instead be trusting God to heal us? And Basil ends up saying, yeah, you should make use of medicine,
2:03.6	or it's certainly fine to make medicine, use of medicine. And he says, listen, medicine is like
2:10.0	agriculture. It is a remedy for a deficiency of our human natures in the world we inhabit.
	...

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