Sacred Science : Ritual and Miracle in Modern Medicine

Sacred Science is an analysis of post-war discourses concerning health and illness. These discourses are an attempt to grasp the meaning of health in our modern human condition, and as such they provide both new insights into the genealogy of conceptualizations of both health and illness, but also serve as a viable hermeneutic summary of many important textual moments in the recent history of health studies, including Foucault, Gadamer, Illich, Sontag, and others. This book is the result of a phenomenological disquisition of the ideas employed by health scholars and philosophers, and its import rests both on its uniqueness in the relevant fields and its new ideas, including ‘indefinitude’, ‘deontic facticity’, and illness as the experience of the simultaneous ‘inexistence’ of both life and death.

Social philosopher Gregory V. Loewen is the author of over twenty books in diverse areas such as ethics, religion, art, education and politics. He has been a professor for almost a quarter of a century at universities in both Canada and the United States. He is currently Professor at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan and was chair of the sociology department for five years. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology and anthropology from the University of British Columbia.