Hardcover
Medicine dissects bodies, but true healing requires seeing the whole person.
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Anatomy of Being

Dissection, Incarnation, and the Origins of Modern Medicine

RRP$99.99

$84.99

  • Hardcover

    468 pages

  • Release Date

    1 March 2027

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Summary

In a sweeping 2,400-year genealogy stretching from ancient Greece to modern neuroscience, Anatomy of Being explores Western medicine’s tendency to reduce patients to objects rather than encounter patients as whole persons.

In this bold, interdisciplinary book, Kimbell Kornu offers a critical history of modern medicine and explores the development of today’s “logic of dissection,” which reduces patients into parts to be mastered rather than persons to be cared for. Crucially, …

Book Details

ISBN-13:9780268211677
ISBN-10:0268211671
Author:Kimbell Kornu
Publisher:University of Notre Dame Press
Imprint:University of Notre Dame Press
Format:Hardcover
Number of Pages:468
Release Date:1 March 2027
Dimensions:152mm x 229mm
A-Format
B-Format
Anatomy of Being by Kimbell Kornu - ISBN: 9780268211677
152 × 229 mm
C-Format
A4
mm / in
What They're Saying

Critics Review

“Who better than a palliative care physician to tell us what is going on in Western medicine and culture in an age when our most contentious debates concern the doctor’s role in ending life? Philosophically profound and historically detailed, Kornu offers us a pathway out of a medical ethics captured by the logic of dissection, toward a medicine that incarnates the mystery of the divine healer.” - Brian Brock, author of Joining Creation’s Praise

“For every physician who has ever reduced a patient to a problem, or every patient who has ever felt reduced, or every theologian who has ever wondered what the Incarnation has to do with the body in a hospital bed, this book is for them. Anatomy of Being excavates the hidden history of our most habitual ways of knowing the human person and shows, with scholarly patience and pastoral urgency, that those habits are not inevitable.” - Ashley Moyse, author of Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World

“Anatomy of Being is a searching, careful journey through the ideas and histories that have made us see bodies as objects to be taken apart. This book challenges all of us in healthcare to reckon with how modes of knowing become modes of harm and persuasively offers the logic of incarnation as a humane corrective to the totalizing tendencies of modern medicine.” - Devan Stahl, author of Disability’s Challenge to Theology

About The Author

Kimbell Kornu

Kimbell Kornu is Provost’s Professor of Bioethics, Theology, and Christian Formation at Belmont University and is a palliative care physician.

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