The Roots of Modern Medicine

The Rev Wes Baker, a missionary in Peru, posts this very useful essay on the roots of modern medicine. I differ with his ecclesiological suppositions (he too much identifies the church with the ministerium, and does not see the civil magistracy as itself a diaconal order in certain respects, whereas the old rites of coronation suggest that this was very much the normative understanding of old Christendom), and overstates in a somewhat confused way what it means for the church to be called to heal the sick, but these essays are quite interesting nonetheless. Whatever might be the case with the old magistracy, Pastor Baker is certainly correct to draw on Foucault in his analysis of the phenomenon of “medicalization” in the modern secularist State.