Jeff Levin - Religion and Medicine: A History of the Encounter Between Humanitys Two Greatest Institutions

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Healing to all Their Flesh: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Spirituality, Theology, and Health

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Faith, Medicine, and Science: A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. David B. Larson

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Religion in The Lives of African Americans: Social, Psychological, and Health Perspectives

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levin, Jeffrey S., author.

Title: Religion and medicine : a history of the encounter between

humanitys two greatest institutions / Jeff Levin, Ph.D., M.P.H. ;

with a foreword by Stephen G. Post.

Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019044758 (print) | LCCN 2019044759 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780190867355 (hb) | ISBN 9780190867379 (epub) | ISBN 9780190867386 (online)

Subjects: LCSH: MedicineReligious aspects.

Classification: LCC BL65.M4 L485 2020 (print) | LCC BL65.M4 (ebook) | DDC 201/.661dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044758

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019044759

For Dr. Berton H. Kaplan, of blessed memory, a great mentor and friend, who encouraged my earliest explorations of the interconnections between religion and medicine

The perennial interface of religion and medicine has cried out for a truly great book that is both fully comprehensive and consistently deep in its analysis. Levins Religion and Medicine succeeds brilliantly in providing the big picture of this interface. It is far and away the finest scholarly work yet published that combines scientific as well as deeply learned humanistic insights in a text of immense clarity, maturity, and sophistication. One would expect this from Jeff, for his book is the culmination of a lifetime of diligent scholarship for which he is rightly renowned. It is hard to imagine that any one scholar could have made such a pioneering contribution across this interface, but indeed Levin has done so.

Religion and Medicine will appeal to a wide variety of readers: the historian, the medical anthropologist, the epidemiologist, the devotee of randomized controlled studies, the medical educator, the medical ethicist and humanist clinician, the healthcare advocate and policymaker, the comparative religionist, the thoughtful scholar of mind-body medicine, and those wanting to know how and from where the intense altruistic passion that strives for the good of patients arose. Levins book also points us in the direction of a new American medicine, one that takes into scientifically informed consideration the subjective meanings of the patient as a person experiencing illness and the healing importance of empathic skills, and that finally takes into full account the oft-quoted 1925 statement of Harvard physician Francis Peabody: For the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

I began reading Jeffs manuscript early one February morning in a Stony Brook Medical Center coffee shop and did not return home until very late at night, astonished by the clarity and depth of analysis on each page. My pen had run out of ink for all the underlining and notes that flowed over those hours as my sense of time and place all but disappeared. I immediately called Harold G. Koenig of Duke University, who is one of two other individuals who might be included with Jeff at the very pinnacle of excellence among researchers on religion and health, and who like me has known Jeff from at least the early 1990s. Harold listened patiently as I enthusiastically explained why this book is the best that we may ever have, or could ever imagine having.

Jeff Levin has many talents, but there has to be something more than talent behind this book. For the past nearly forty years Jeff has been enduringly called to this work by a special spiritual vocation that makes him one of the most reliably creative scholars, speakers, and educators of our time. Religion and Medicine is nothing less than a work of love for truth, humanity, and healing at its fullest. After reading it, I am convinced that no oneand certainly not myselfcould possibly write a foreword that can do this book justice.

A day after reading his manuscript, I emailed Jeff a brief note of congratulations. He wrote back, Stephen, this was a labor of love... a summary of every dimension of this encounter since the beginning of time. I spent a lot of hours, while writing, wondering if I was nuts in taking this on, but am happy with how it turned out. I have always felt there needed to be a single scholarly text that brings everything together and looks at the big picture, and I am grateful that I can leave this one work behind me when I shuffle off some day. Jeff (email, February 23, 2019). Professor Levin, when you shuffle off some day, please rest assured that you have created a great work that will take its place among the classics, and know that your readers are deeply grateful. If the great physician William Osler were alive today, given his strong appreciation for the interface of medicine and religion generally and his interest in patients experience of illness in particular, Jeffs book would most certainly occupy an honored place on his legendary bedside reading table.

We might note that the ancient Hippocratic physicians were unlikely to treat the poor, the contagious, or the dying, and only later in the West under the influence of the three Abrahamic religious traditions do we see emerging the passion for the care of the patient that we hope to find in every good physician today. Levin, who comes from a lineage of notable rabbis and physicians, rightly points to the fact that so many institutions of healing were birthed by religion, externalizations of its prophetic role to speak out against brokenness and to labor to repair the world. He ends the book with a call to us all to heal the world