The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Spirituality, Religious Wisdom, and the Care of the Patient

Love and the Care of the Patient: A Protestant/Jewish Dialogue: Introduction

Alan B. Astrow, M.D.
aastrow@maimonidesmed.org

Our final conference for the year, entitled "Love and the Care of the Patient:  A Protestant/Jewish Dialogue," was held on June 3, 2002. While love is seen by many religious traditions as the supreme value, the notion that physicians and nurses should love their patients seems to some to be asking too much of harried health care professionals. Love is a confusing and potentially disruptive emotion.  Physicians and nurses need to treat their patients well regardless of their personal feelings.

Still, faced at times with patients who may seem difficult and demanding, and with illnesses that may be frustrating and resistant to treatment, what are the inner resources that health care professionals may call upon to sustain their professionalism? We asked our two speakers, Professor Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School and Rabbi Rolando Matalon of Manhattan's Congregation B'nai Jeshurun, to consider the two-edged quality to love as a spiritual value in patient care both from the standpoint of the treating health care professional and from the standpoint of patient and family.

Our year-long series, now concluded, sought to provide a forum for health care professionals to explore the genuinely spiritual issues that are raised in the course of caring for the sick. The conference organizers believed that medicine consists of more than a body, of knowledge, methods, and techniques. Medicine also has an intrinsic spirit, that to which medicine aspires. Most health care practitioners know this intuitively and care about their patients as individuals.  They may, however, lack the language and the occasion to express what they, in their best moments, feel. Holding a conference series of this sort, with high profile speakers engaged in conversation with health care professionals in the setting of a busy teaching hospital and cancer center, underscored our belief that attention to spiritual values in medicine is central to the provision of the highest quality of patient care.

The series focused on the contributions of our religious traditions to spirituality because those traditions are, at least in part, repositories of wisdom and experience, and may provide a context for appreciating what's at stake in our efforts on behalf of the sick. William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, argued that we judge the truth of religious experience by its "fruits for life." Not quite 100 years later at an annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology a poster presentation by Dr. Jimmie Holland's group from Memorial Sloan Kettering nicely illustrated James's meaning. Studying the phenomenon of  "burn-out" among house staff on an oncology ward, Holland found to her surprise, that residents who identified religious faith as important to them were significantly less likely to act in a callous or cynical manner.  A heightened awareness of the religious dimension to the care of the sick appeared to yield "cash value" in a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in medical practice.

Harvey Cox, "The Role of Love in the Treatment of the Patient: A Protestant View"
Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon, "Love and the Care of the Patient"
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Published: September 6, 2002