Farr Curlin discusses Jeffrey Bishop’s book The Anticipatory Corpse …
In The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying, physician-philosopher Jeffrey Bishop argues that modern medicine has adopted a “metaphysics of efficient causation”—a focus on the immediate cause of things that ignores their ultimate purpose. As a result, medicine now takes its bearings from and aims itself toward the dead body, the corpse. This leads to nihilistic attitudes toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices.(link)
Daniel Sulmasy’s review