The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Spirituality, Religious Wisdom, and the Care of the Patient

Anger in the Context of Illness: Anglican/Jewish Perspectives: Introduction

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

If you watched the recent Presidential debates, you heard the candidates asked about how religious faith influenced their policy decisions.  We had an analogous question open for discussion on the evening of October 18 at Beth Israel Medical Center of New York.   As health care professionals involved in caring for the seriously ill, should religious faith influence how we treat out patients? If so, how?  And a larger question since the conference was a cooperative effort of two institutions, St. Vincent's and Beth Israel, with religious sponsorship: in a pluralistic society where health care institutions employ and treat individuals from diverse religious backgrounds, in what way, if at all, should religious faith influence the culture of a hospital?

The relevance of that evening's topic, anger, should be obvious to anyone involved in patient care.  In a typical day, there is usually at least one person who is angry: a patient, a colleague, an administrator, ourselves.   For the most part how we handle it is a matter of personal maturity and insight.   What we need to do sometimes is to take a deep breath, remind ourselves that there is no need to be defensive, and, if we can, close the door.  But in the care of seriously ill patients, where it may be a kind of existential anger that we face, the question is whether we require an added dimension of understanding to what we can learn from the language of therapeutic insight?   Is there a more comprehensive level of need that we ought to acknowledge, a need that would have us try at least briefly to view our own concerns in a larger and more enduring context?  It is certainly about us, but is it only about us?

Those are some of the questions that we posed to Solomon Schimmel, Professor of Psychology and Education at the Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts and to Sarah Coakley, Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr. Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.

Sarah Coakley, "Anger in the Context of Illness- An Anglican Perspective"
Solomon Schimmel, "Anger in the Context of Illness- Perspectives from Jewish Tradition"
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Published: January 12, 2005