Anticipatory Corpse, The Quotes

“Medicine gives no thought to its metaphysics; it might even deny having one. And it gives no thought to its practices, because medicine is about doing and not about thinking.”
― Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying

“Medicine’s metaphysical stance, then, is a metaphysics of material and efficient causation, concerned with the empirical realm of matter, effects, and the rational working out of their causes for the purposes of finding ways to control the material of bodies; that is to say, medicine’s metaphysics of causation is one of material and efficient causation at the expense of final causes or purposes.”
― Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying

“For death and the disease that is its harbinger are the most brutal reminders of the radical finitude of human existence.”
― Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying

“There is something unsettling about the power of medicine when it brings its expertise to implementing the norm, or normality, when medicine deploys an entire social apparatus to make people normal. Yet the oddness is perhaps even more acute when doctors take away a life that is perceived to be abnormal, or when it is perceived to have abnormal amounts of suffering, or when the patient’s predicament is outside the norm of human comforts.”
― Jeffrey P. Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying