I am pretty sure that this book is going to be one of the books which express most fully the spirit of the 21^st Century as regards the inter-dependency of Ethics, Religion, Medicine and Cultural Politics! The author has written a book attacking most of the commonly (and naively) accepted views in relation to Church, Health, Society, and Politics. As such, it is bound to attract much attention from the political right in the USA, and most possibly, even the Church.

In the spirit of Hippocrates, the ancient Greek doctor who systematically analyzed and discussed the complex nature of health (which is not only a matter of the body), Allen discusses most of the interesting (and gruesome) details of the handling of patients in the most dark and inhumane time (and recently related to an official apology from the Catholic Church). His argument is simple, yet most difficult to accept: we are responsible for the death of many fellow humans due to the prejudice deeply rooted in our culture, which equates disease with sin and suffering with punishment. This prejudice, as absurd as it may seem, has caused extreme suffering and excruciatingly painful death to many, and a masochist self-gratification to some.

As Allen shows in his discussion of lovesickness, leprosy and bubonic plague in the Middle Ages, and masturbation and AIDS in modern and contemporary American and European society, this prejudice has turned a religion (and with it the culture which was formulated on its principles) of compassion and love into a cruel cultural edifice for the masochistic administration of pain and suffering. Many of the issues that Allen discusses in the book will be of interest to philosophers, cultural theorists, students or researchers of religion and medicine, politics and history. Perhaps the most interesting may be the relation of ethics to psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychodynamics, the machine-like attitudes to the human body and the development of the bodily fluids theory in the Middle Ages, the fear of creativity and spontaneity in the melting-pot American society of the 18^th -20^th century, the responsibility of the Christian right in the failure to save many AIDS victims during the beginning of the epidemic, the relation of education, politics and religion.

There are few things which may put the reader off: the openly homosexual stand of the author and his frequent reference to his lost lovers may seem unwarranted to most of the heterosexual readers (good examples are pp.xiiv-xvii, 154-5), but this draw-back may be compensated by the frank attitude through-out the book and his lack of ‘politically correct’ self-righteousness (which is in fashion in most of the related literature). In addition, followers of the Reaganist political right in the USA may find the criticisms of the author hard to endure and may question his conclusion that the more erotic a preventive literature is the more effective it is (p.138).

The book also gives the impression that the Church was and still is at fault for most of the cruelty and death that the patients find in their lives. Allen states repeatedly that there are two faces in the Christian religion (the cruel and masochist self-righteous, and the loving and compassionate one), but (as a Christian) I find his criticisms at places a little bit far fetched: that a monk, a priest, a preacher, a cardinal, or even the Pope himself stated in a sermon or a letter that bubonic plague or AIDS homosexual victims are at fault and are punished by God for their wrong-doings this does not (and can not) characterize the Christian theological stance on the issue, and can not even foreclose on the behavior of the people of the time of the sermon or the letter. As in many occasions, preachers over-emphasize the issues to protect believers from wrongdoing, but this does not mean that they will put what they teach into action, or that the believers shall hear them. In most circumstances compassion gets in the way, and prevents us from inhumane and cruel behavior that is dictated by our religious or ethical principles.

Even though there are these few shortcomings in the book, the author compensates the reader with the rich results of his serious research into the sources and his critical and thought-provoking analysis of the issues involved. Allen’s work in Medieval, Modern and Contemporary Cultural Analysis is a worthy offspring of the tradition of Foucault (especially his later work in Discipline and Punish, 1975 and The History of Sexuality, 1976), which in a way ended the 20^th century, and opened the discursive interdependency of Ethics, Medicine and Religion in the 21^st.

Constantinos Athanasopoulos has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Glasgow (on the topic of The Metaphysics of Intentionality in the Philosophy of Language and Mind of Sartre and Wittgenstein). He has also studied philosophy, psychology and religion at Brandon U., Canada, and Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews. Currently, he is writing books for the Greek Open University (one on Medieval Philosophy and another on Byzantine Civilization) and teaches part-time philosophy courses at the University of Athens and the University of Patras, Greece. His many research interests include metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, Continental and Analytic, Ancient Greek, Medieval and Byzantine Philosophy, moral psychology, ethics, environmental philosophy and ethics, political philosophy, philosophy of education, philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. Parallel to job-hunting his other hobbies include Byzantine Music, Orthodox Theology, camping and going to the movies.

Categories: Philosophical, General