“Life in the first of it and life in the last of it are both prismatic cases of human helplessness.” – Paul Ramsey, “The Patient as Person”
When there is talk about the premiere Christian ethicists of the 20th century, the name Paul Ramsey consistently rises to the top of the list.
Few ethicist-theologians were as clear, consistent and (perhaps more importantly) as prophetic as Paul Ramsey. His ability to peel back cultural norms and societal trends to reveal the philosophical core of the issues was unparalleled by his contemporaries. In particular, his work among medical ethics set the standard of scholarship for Christian ethicist for the rest of the century on into the new millennium. But if you’re like me, you’ve probably never heard of him, his work, or his countless contributions to contemporary Protestant ethics. As usual, this time, ignorance is not bliss.
While preparing for a bioethics course that I am enrolled in this fall, I came across a couple of references to Paul Ramsey’s book “The Patient as Person” in Gilbert Meilaender’s ethics primer entitled “Bioethics“. Having encountered Ramsey in a previous course on the ethics of invitro fertilization in his book “Fabricated Man“, I was interested to read his handling of issues such as organ donation, human experimentation, and euthanasia. Though I am a pro-life activist, I have never been captured with the ethical weight of “end of life” questions in the way that I have with “beginning of life” issues. Ramsey remedied that apathy extremely well.
Like most texts that are converted from a lecture series, the material is quite specific and technical at times, but in typical fashion Ramsey elucidates the ethical points of a myriad of issues connected with the ends and means of medicine and medical ethics — and does it in a way that hits home (reminding his readers that physicians are to “cure sometimes, to relieve often, and to comfort always”). For instance, in commenting on the theo-philosophical aspects of death, Ramsey makes a bold claim:
” “The process of dying” needs to be got out of the hospitals and back into the home and in the midst of family, neighborhood, and friends. This would be a “systemic change” in our present institutions for caring for the dying as difficult to bring about as some fundamental change in foreign policy or the nation-state system. Still, any doctor will tell you that by no means does everyone need to die in a hospital who today does so. They are there because families want them there, or because neighbors might think not everything was done in efforts to save them. They are there because hospitals are well equipped to “manage death,” and families are ill equipped to do so.
If the “systemic change” here proposed in caring for the dying were actually brought about, ministers, priests, and rabbis would have on their hands a great many shattered families and relatives. But for once they would be shattered by confrontation with reality, by the claims of the dying not to be deserted, not to be pushed from the circle that specially owes them love and care, not to be denied human presence with them. Then God might not be as dead as lately He is supposed to be. The “sealing up of metaphysical concerns,” Peter Berger recently pointed out, is one of the baneful results of a “happy” childhood — a childhood unhappily sheltered from the dying in all our advanced societies.”
I could write more and explain more, but you get the drift, now get the book.
‘BH
