THE WAY of MEDICINE – ETHICS and the HEALING PROFESSION

Farr Curlin, MD, Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities, Professor of Medicine, Co-Director, Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative, Duke University

What is medicine and what is it for? What does it mean to be a good doctor? In this talk, Dr. Farr 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.

6 pm: Mass followed by dinner
Presentation/Q&A to follow
Location to be determined

Registration required. From below.