496 - The Patient's Ordeal

The Patient's Ordeal

By William F. May

Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991. 218 Pp. $24.95.

"Theological tradition states this imperative with the full force of the voice of God." Throughout its pages The Patient's Ordeal reads like prophetic literature. Whether speaking of mental retardation or the transplantation of fetal tissue, William F. May speaks forcefully. Even cancer might have been a cheerier choice than the dangers, toils, and snares that the Cary Macguire Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University has selected for his latest volume on medical ethics.

In previous works, May focused on the ethics of the health care provider. In this series of essays, the author posits himself vis-a-vis the afflicted. There are no euphemisms employed to soften the blunt truth about the sexual molestation of children. The vices as well as the virtues of the elderly are divulged. The author would have us consider the healing response to the victimizers as well as to their victims. Chapter title choices like "The Gestated and the Sold" let us know where he stands on the "Baby M" case. This prophet is no shy Moses.

Impaired health may be a common feature of the narratives, but the experience as "patient" is not the complete story. My patient may be

498 - The Patient's Ordeal

your parishioner but someone else's parent. No single word can adequately embrace the person who is the victim of these afflictions. Few of us have Mother Teresa's spiritual eyes to see a Person in a person. If you know a mot more juste than "patient," you can write the next book, but please resist, as May did, the current vogue of calling a patient a client. As the father of one of my patients says, "I can hear the cash register ringing."

In linking the healing arts to the good news, the prophet emerges as optimist. In his 1983 book, The Physician's Covenant, May writes, "The covenant in Christ, in effect, locates the self, the beleaguered, fearful self, within the dynamics of giving and receiving.... The bond to the world and the patient becomes bearable because, strictly speaking, the covenanted cannot take the ideals and terrors of the ordinary world with ultimate seriousness." As committed as May is to dialogue with the medical establishment, he is also aware of how often a purely medical model fails. He admires healing alliances, like Alcoholics Anonymous, where "the afflicted assist the afflicted." The literature of this movement reminds the author of religious rather than medical traditions of healing.

When May approaches conditions where the right to die may be considered, he shifts from the worn-out arguments of quantity versus quality of life to a concept with spiritual overtones. He sees rebirth imaged by the burn patient who is first "baptized" by fire, then immersed in the waters of the Hubbard tank. "The responsibility of the community has just begun if it has imposed survival upon the individual in the midst of what the individual in some circumstances can only experience as a fearful ordeal." Life/death/rebirth is one of his favorite themes but he resists its overuse. "While Christian ethics and worship justify and encourage organ transplants, the Christian, I suspect, would have to draw back from the sentimental and inflationary language of some who would want to interpret such deeds as acts ensuring symbolic immortality."

Some of the themes encountered here are so-called "women's issues." Doubtless, the book will be read by women who have experienced some of the very ordeals that May describes. I hope that this male prophet will receive an open-minded reading by female prophets who also have important words to share with us on these subjects. Finding grace-filled solutions for these ordeals necessitates the cooperative activity of Christian women and men.

There are theological threads throughout the book, but the Christological reflections are concentrated in a postscript. Here is the poet's opportunity to weave the strands of fragmented lives together. "The prospect of rebirth conflicts in countless ways with all the terms and conditions under which men and women like to handle their lives.... A complex, continuing struggle between identities ensues." ⁵

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I find Professor May a welcome and fiery partner in Christ's healing work. "Fire changes the metal it tempers," reminds the author in his closing sentence. Read this book, and be ye tempered.

DIANE M. KOMP

Yale University School of Medicine
New Haven, Connecticut