Reviews
This book is highly recommended to anyone who is interested in the intersection of religion and medicine... I expect this book to become required reading for many clinical health care and bioethics classes (as well as history classes).
Medicine and Religion will serve as a useful introduction to anyone — which means everyone — who will experience its twin themes.
This book is quite wonderful... It covers a large amount of history in the setting of a relatively short book, but the information that is contained in the eight chapters and epilogue is incredibly well presented in an easy-to-read manner.
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's book] will be particularly useful for students in divinity and religious studies and all those qualifying for social health care who might find themselves in search of new perspectives in caring for the sick and the dying in today's all too often spiritually deprived, cost-benefit-based health care institutions.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Ancient Near East
2. Greece
3. Rome
4. Early Christianity
5. The Middle Ages
6. Islam in the Middle Ages, with Mahdieh Tavakol
7. The Early Modern Period
8. The Nineteenth
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Ancient Near East
2. Greece
3. Rome
4. Early Christianity
5. The Middle Ages
6. Islam in the Middle Ages, with Mahdieh Tavakol
7. The Early Modern Period
8. The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Epilogue
Notes
Index