Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine & Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. xii, 241, paperback, £16, ISBN: 978-1-4214-1216-0.

Gary B. Ferngren is familiar with the often volatile, always interesting intersections of science and religion. His Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (2002) and Medicine and Healthcare in Early Christianity (2009), both published by Johns Hopkins University Press, made important contributions to the field. At last, instructors who wanted relatively succinct but authoritative treatments of these subjects had excellent additions to their classroom syllabi. This new book is no exception.

Ferngren organises this study into a brief introduction with eight chapters and an epilogue: ‘The Ancient Near East’, ‘Greece’, ‘Early Christianity’, ‘The Middle Ages’, ‘Islam in the Middle Ages’ (assisted by Madieh Tavakol), ‘The Early Modern Period’, and ‘The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’. This works well for a general introductory volume, taking readers through these twin magisteria chronologically. Ferngren relies upon Darrel Amundsen’s ‘configurations’ of medicine and religion for his historical framework, demonstrating their relationships in four stages: (1) medicine subsumed under religion; (2) medicine and religion’s partial separation; (3) the complete separation of medicine and religion; and (4) religion subsumed under medicine (pp. 4–5). Such an approach avoids the extremes of the old – largely discredited – science vs. religion warfare thesis on the one hand and Stephen Jay Gould’s naive division of science and religion into happy Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA) on the other.¹

As effective as Ferngren is at explaining the complex interactions of medicine and religion, a couple of things will likely set the reader to some head-scratching. For example, the complete omission of Thomas Percival from the discussion is surprising since his Medical Ethics ² is considered seminal in the development of a modern, professional code of practice and behaviour. His influence upon the American medical profession was tremendous. The Association of Boston Physicians drew upon Percival for their ‘Medical Police’ almost verbatim, and the American Medical Association similarly relied upon him for their code of ethics in 1847.³ Nearly every page of that historic work is imbued with the sensibilities of a firm Christian believer who attempted to instil in his colleagues the sense of duty and responsibility demanded of a Christ-like compassion. Percival’s absence seems conspicuous.

Also, chapter nine attempts too much. Material abounds for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a fact that would have been better handled by separating them. For example, while Darwin is briefly mentioned, it would have been instructive to have a more detailed discussion of how Darwinian thought promoted methodological naturalism and a privileging of the scientific magisterium over the religious. Despite Gould’s special pleadings for a benign NOMA, Francis Schaeffer argued thirty years before that the ‘lower story’ (Nature, Science, empiricism) would always subsume the ‘upper story’ (nurture, faith, sensibility):

Nature, having been made autonomous, has eaten up both grace and freedom. An autonomous lower story will always eat up the upper. The lesson is: whenever you make such a dualism and begin to set up one autonomous section below, the result is that the lower eats up the upper. This has happened time after time in the last few hundred years. If you try artificially to keep the autonomous in one area only, soon the autonomous will embrace [i.e. subsume] the other.⁴

Schaeffer’s point is clearly borne out in Medicine & Religion. Medicine’s autonomy from its faith-based moorings began at least as early as the Enlightenment,⁵ but the nineteenth century confirmed it. Evolution, as Ferngren correctly notes, was never of major significance in clinical medicine, but Darwin, his ‘bull dog defender’ physician Thomas Henry Huxley, and the X Club founded by Huxley not only professionalised science, but more importantly, did much to recast society as one that specifically privileged scientific inquiry as the leading arbiter of truth – science became Science. From Philip Harvey’s Footprints of life, or, Faith and Nature Reconciled (1868) to Sherman Nuland’s The Mysteries Within (2001) and many in between, physicians have grappled with this issue. Its brief and cursory treatment as a relatively small part of a single chapter seems a bit puzzling under the circumstances.

Yet it would be churlish to exaggerate these criticisms into wholesale condemnation. Overall, Ferngren does a good job. Indeed his Epilogue more than makes up for any blind spots or light coverage. Eschewing the cynicism of a modernist or the relativism of a postmodernist, Ferngren explains Christianity’s positive impact upon health and healing. In short, it engendered a compassion that was unknown in the pagan world and which bore fruit in the establishment of hospitals and holy orders devoted to the care of the sick and infirm. Appreciative of the many distinctions between our age and those that came before us, he is correct to note our common bonds to the human condition. Ferngren ends on a justly cautionary note that our fixation with technology and health care costs may strip us from the spirit that allowed so much progress in medicine in the post-pagan age. He concludes ‘that an unintentional but perhaps inevitable result of the removal of religious values from medical institutions has been to cut them off from the very source from which compassion springs’ (p. 213). Others may disagree, but this reader found Ferngren’s argument compelling.