Good Deaths, "Stupid Deaths": Humane Medicine and the Call of Invisible Bodies

Jeffrey Bishop's The Anticipatory Corpse exposes a functional metaphysics at the root of contemporary medical practice that gives rise to inhumane medicine, especially at the end of life. His critique of medicine argues for alternative spaces and practices in which the communal significance of the body, its telos, can be restored and the meaning of a "good death" enriched. This essay develops an alternative epistemology of the body, drawing from Christian theological accounts of the communal or Eucharistic body and linking liturgical practices to the cultivation of solidarity. It argues for an epistemology of the body that makes visible the invisible bodies at medicine's margins and illumines the disparate worlds of health care globally.