Reading Medicine: Mind, Body, and Meditation in One Interpretive Community

Abstract

This essay challenges the common conception that biomedicine operates by separating the mind from the body, and by attending to the biological rather than spiritual. In actual practice, there are practical and strategic concerns that bring the spiritual into play. This is because, at least in the case of chronic illnesses, clinicians cannot simply fix bodies; they must create partnerships with patients and family caregivers who also assume responsibilities in providing clinical care and making medical decisions about course of treatment. Drawing from a longitudinal ethnographic study of African American families who have children with serious chronic medical conditions, I examine how these families bring spiritual practices and spiritual ways of "reading the body" directly into the clinical encounter. Patients and family members creatively remake or reinterpret the oral and written words of clinicians and incorporate them within their own narratives of miraculous recoveries, the power of faith, and the centrality of meditative prayer. In doing so, they unite spiritual with physical healing in ways not dissimilar to the pre-modern practices Brian Stock describes. For these families, such meditative practices are often part of life-long journeys, connecting practices of healing to a general philosophy of life well understood by the ancients.