New technologies are changing the nature of medicine from a form of therapy aimed at restoring health to a kind of perfectionism aimed at individual enhancement.
Speaking at the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht, said that the classical understanding of medicine was summed up by the Latin phrase “restitutio ad integram”. This meant that medicine was an art or science specifically oriented to restoring a patient to wholeness, or, in other words, the treatment of people suffering from diseases and injuries so as to restore them to full health.
Over the last half century, however, a raft of new technologies and treatments has produced a corresponding radical shift in the purpose of medicine itself. Its new orientation might be described by the phrase “transformatio ad optimum” – meaning a remaking of the patient into some perfected state. In practice, this means medicine going beyond mere therapy and instead offering enhancements to improve or perfect otherwise healthy individuals.
One example of this is plastic surgery, which can be used to repair the external appearance of an injured limb, but can also be used to change one’s appearance to conform to some preconceived notion of perfection. The latter can lead to real problems, as shown by the face of the late performer Michael Jackson. Another area is “sexual reassignment” where the use of hormones and surgery aim at changing the sexuality of the body to a certain extent.
The Cardinal noted that not only is the nature of medicine changed by these treatments, but culture also is changed. People begin to view their biological nature as something they can modify or dispose of at will.
This, in turn, fuels two further assumptions: a culture of radical individualism and a dualistic view of man that identifies the mind with the person and sees the body as merely some external attachment.
Such views, though, denigrate the importance of our bodies and fail to explain the intense unity of body and soul that we actually experience in our daily lives. The French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, used the striking phrase “I am my body” to express how essential the body is to who we are, and Sacred Scripture gives further eloquent testimony to this by affirming that it is in our body and soul that we are created in the image of God, not simply in our soul.
The Cardinal concluded by saying: “Medicine should maintain its therapeutic character. It should serve the human person through his body in the form of a “restoratio ad integrum”. For this end we should try to develop our medical arsenal as much as is possible. . . . However, the application of such techniques, aimed at improving the biological nature of man, a “transformatio ad optimum”, will not serve the human being in his body, but would instrumentalise him for an interest outside of himself.”