Theology and Medicine:
At the Spirit-Body Interface in the Midst of an Epidemic

Prof. S. Mark Heim (MDiv ’76) and Dr. Benjamin Doolittle

Since 2017 Dr. Benjamin Doolittle (Professor at Yale Medical School, United Church of Christ pastor and Andover Newton affiliate faculty member) and Andover Newton professor S. Mark Heim (MDiv ’76) have been team teaching a course on theology and medicine. The course mixes students from Yale’s graduate schools (including medicine, nursing, and public health) with divinity school students. It explores topics of traditional interest in both fields ---suffering, illness, healing and well-being---in interdisciplinary terms. The course focuses not primarily on pastoral care or chaplaincy, but on a conversation about faith and meaning stimulated by the concrete issues experienced in giving and receiving medical care. Class topics range from the latest studies on the relation of well-being to religious practice (and on the kinds of religion that are good for us) to insights on burnout among doctors and ministers. Visiting speakers like Andover Newton graduate Dr. Gary Strichartz (MDiv ’14)—who is both a chronic pain researcher and a chaplain—explore where religious understandings of suffering intersect with the neurology of pain. The Broadway play and film Angels in America becomes the jumping off point for a consideration of the medical, moral and spiritual dimensions of the HIV epidemic. Readings range from Victoria Sweet’s God’s Hotel to Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal and articles from the Journal of the American Medical Association.     

In the fall of 2020 this course on theology and medicine has been swept up in the COVID medical crisis we are all experiencing. One of the distinctive things about the course has been the way it took students out of the classroom and into the medical world. Students visited the hospital and interacted with medical teams there. They traveled to the anatomy lab to participate in class alongside medical and nursing students. They spent time in the medical library, visiting the Cushing “Brain Room,” and handling archival texts and manuscripts that bridged the worlds of alchemy and the rise of modern medicine. Ironically, COVID restrictions shut many of the doors and windows into the medical world that the course tried to open. So, Doolittle and Heim have had to re-engineer the course, both to deal with the new online educational medium and to replace the many “hands on” elements they had worked to develop.

Part of their response has been to build a significant portion of the course around pandemics in history and our pandemic in particular. The students will mix the data from epidemics past (like smallpox) and current with texts like Camus’s The Plague. The “hands on” dimension of the course has become the normal, everyday experience of the students and teachers living in the midst of this medical crisis. As one of the students—an epidemiologist-- said at the first class meeting this fall, “I studied about this all my life, but I never thought I would live through it.”

At the recent Andover Newton Alumni/ae Convocation, Doolittle and Heim led a workshop that offered a taste of this new pandemic dimension from their course, one for which everyone had already done the “lab” work in advance!