Week 10: Weight of the World

This week I really want to concentrate on Francois Bonvin's article entitled Sick Person as Object found in The Weight of the World by Pierre Bourdieu et al..

I was struck by the hospital culture in France (which is likely not very different from America). In the article, Bonvin relates how the mission of the hospital is lost. In the startling article, he articulates through Isabelle his interviewee how the sick are not treated as patients but as objects or even worse, nuisances.

Isabelle states:

You are reduced to a state of nothingness. It's a question of convenience. They no longer think that they're dealing with a human being, I think. (Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, 1999, 597.)

Furthermore, she says:

[The doctors] had impossibly limited minds, they reduced you to your handicap. (Ibid., 592)

It was a wake up call to me and my treatment of the HIV/AIDS crisis as I had always assumed that providing the opportunity to medical care would be the cure all to some extent. But this article has woken me up to the reality that the presence of the possibility of proper medical care does not necessarily ensure proper medical care.

What can be done about the culture of the medical world? I am afraid that the church as a body can do very little. This is something that can only be changed from the inside, that is from the doctors themselves. Jesus following doctors must be careful themselves from falling into this trap. The sick and the dying, those suffering from HIV/AIDS are not nuisances nor are they defined by their condition. Those suffering from HIV/AIDS are people. To borrow from Martin Luther King Jr., we are to embrace a universal altruism that values people as fellow people.

This exhortation is not limited to doctors. All too often, I'm afraid, the church has limited its view of those suffering from HIV/AIDS as the disease itself. That is, when we see someone with HIV/AIDS, we see HIV/AIDS, not the fellow person created in the image of God. Can we identify with that person? Or is that person someone "other", outside of our realm of consciousness, outside of the care of the family?