Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In a sweeping 2,400-year genealogy stretching from ancient Greece to modern neuroscience, Anatomy of Being explores Western medicine’s tendency to reduce patients to objects rather than encounter patients as whole persons.
In this bold, interdisciplinary book, Kimbell Kornu offers a critical history of modern medicine and explores the development of today’s “logic of dissection,” which reduces patients into parts to be mastered rather than persons to be cared for. Crucially, Kornu uncovers how the dissective gaze was historically driven by the desire to make visible that which is invisible, eventually giving rise to a highly mechanistic medical imagination.
Bridging ancient Greek medicine and philosophy, Christological debates in the early Church, the relationship between logic and metaphysics, Renaissance art history, the transformation of natural philosophy, and modern neuroscience, Anatomy of Being tells a sweeping story about how epistemology shaped ethics. Framed by his clinical experience and expertise, Kornu argues that the logic of dissection must remain a tool, rather than the primary way a doctor views a patient’s body. He offers an alternative: the “logic of incarnation,” rooted in Christ’s own embodiment, in which the body and the self are inseparable. To promote true human flourishing, each person must be treated with holistic care.
“Who better than a palliative care physician to tell us what is going on in Western medicine and culture in an age when our most contentious debates concern the doctor’s role in ending life? Philosophically profound and historically detailed, Kornu offers us a pathway out of a medical ethics captured by the logic of dissection, toward a medicine that incarnates the mystery of the divine healer.” —Brian Brock, author of Joining Creation’s Praise
“For every physician who has ever reduced a patient to a problem, or every patient who has ever felt reduced, or every theologian who has ever wondered what the Incarnation has to do with the body in a hospital bed, this book is for them. Anatomy of Being excavates the hidden history of our most habitual ways of knowing the human person and shows, with scholarly patience and pastoral urgency, that those habits are not inevitable.” —Ashley Moyse, author of Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World
"Anatomy of Being is a searching, careful journey through the ideas and histories that have made us see bodies as objects to be taken apart. This book challenges all of us in healthcare to reckon with how modes of knowing become modes of harm and persuasively offers the logic of incarnation as a humane corrective to the totalizing tendencies of modern medicine." —Devan Stahl, author of Disability's Challenge to Theology
Kimbell Kornu is Provost’s Professor of Bioethics, Theology, and Christian Formation at Belmont University and is a palliative care physician.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Medical Dissection
1. First, Do No Harm?
2. The Divine, Dissective Gaze
3. Anatomical Theology
Transition One
Part 2. Mental Dissection
4. Theological Dissection
5. Anatomy of Being
Part 3. Modern Dissection
6. “Know Thyself” as Self-Dissection
7. Dissecting the World
8. Dissecting the Cerebral Subject
Transition Two
9. Overcoming Dissection: The Logic of Incarnation
Bibliography
Index