What Does Any of This Have to Do With Being a Physician? Kierkegaardian Irony and the Practice of Medicine
Growing physician discontent may express an anxiety that the medicine we practice today, at its best, is not medicine at all. If so, such discontent may be a dysfunctional form of irony-not irony as the term is generally used today, but irony as the concept is used by Kierkegaard and recovered by th...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2016]
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| In: |
Christian bioethics
Year: 2016, Volume: 22, Issue: 1, Pages: 62-79 |
| IxTheo Classification: | NCH Medical ethics VA Philosophy ZB Sociology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Growing physician discontent may express an anxiety that the medicine we practice today, at its best, is not medicine at all. If so, such discontent may be a dysfunctional form of irony-not irony as the term is generally used today, but irony as the concept is used by Kierkegaard and recovered by the philosopher Jonathan Lear. In this essay, I describe Lear's account of Kierkegaardian irony and the forms irony may take in the practice of medicine. I then describe several contemporary dynamics that seem to suppress irony by suggesting that there is nothing more to medicine than its current social practices. I close by proposing that a Christian imagination provides physicians resources to recognize and make sense of irony and to respond to it (and their discontent) not by detaching altogether from the practice of medicine, but by faithfully renewing their efforts to become the physicians they are called to be but are not quite sure how to become. |
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| ISSN: | 1744-4195 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christian bioethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/cb/cbv029 |