Read this line in Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone”. It’s the last line in a letter of complaint written by a mother whose son died in hospital –
The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for ignoring his being.
I think this is at the heart of what’s wrong with health care. We’ve reduced human beings to human bodies. The truth is a body is an important part of a human being, but there’s something about a being which is not reducible to what can be weighed or measured. In pursuing the science of understanding the body, we’ve lost the art of discovering and relating to human beings.
Heroes Not Zombies 
[…] I read the line in “Cutting The Stone” about looking after the body, but not the being, I remembered some lines from T S Eliot’s The Cocktail Party – here they are – Or take […]
Was it C.S. Lewis who said something to the effect of “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body”? I have always loved that.