Abstract

This dissertation focuses on health, healing, and healers and how our understanding of these concepts affects health care. Although contemporary medical practice has been successful in curing and even eradicating many diseases, its reductionist definition of health limits our understanding of healing and unduly narrows the group of healers; health reduces to the absence of disease, healing to curing, and healers to the medical profession. Although much has been written concerning the problems of contemporary medical practice, few practicing physicians have provided a philosophical or theological reflection on the issues at stake. This dissertation will analyze the perspectives of two of its most influential revisionists--Edmund Pellegrino and Eric Cassell. Not only do they provide a philosophy of medicine from which to examine the concepts of health, healing, and healers, but they are both practicing physicians--Pellegrino rooted in a Roman Catholic and classical philosophical tradition, and Cassell, that of a secular humanist. These revisionists interpret illness more wholistically, expand correspondingly the task of medicine, enlarge the role of the physician, and enhance the patient/physician relationship. However, they have failed to broaden sufficiently the meaning of health and healing and to appreciate the role of the patient and other professionals as healers. ;It is crucial to go outside the profession of medicine as a basis for expanding our understanding of health, healing, and healers. Accordingly, this dissertation moves beyond the work of these internal critics or revisionists, and examines health, healing, and healers from a Judeo-Christian theological perspective, clarified by philosophical analysis. The definition of health as wholeness and sickness as brokenness expands healing to embrace any activity which moves us toward wholeness and healers to include the patient, along with those persons whose professional task it is to heal. ;Finally, this dissertation examines a primary health care clinic, the Ombersley Road Surgery, which internalizes theological constructs into its operational philosophy. This model incorporates an expanded notion of health, healing, and healers which operates in a secular, pluralistic setting