Cancer and personhood

Extract

The effects of a disease alter every aspect of the person's being. Even with a fairly mild illness, treatment of the disease will change the patient's work and social habits, family relationships, and outlook. When the illness is cancer, and when, as in this particular case, death was almost certain in a short and measured time, the effect on the person is enormous. Generally, medicine, in accord with traditional religious teaching, stressed the division of man into two parts: body and soul. The body was the proper focus of temporal care and the soul belonged to the spiritual domain, the churches and their clergy. Church teaching explained that the body waged a constant battle with the soul and was a source of temptation and sin—sloth, greed, lust, and pride—these appetites had to be chastened so the soul could survive its brief earthly visit and enjoy eternal salvation after the death of the body. Medicine, therefore, looked at all parts of the body and tried to make them work well together. What kind of a person was left, after the body had been worked on, was not the concern of medicine.