medical materialism

is the wrong-headed explaining away of certain religious experiences by underlying medical causes (seizures, hysterics, disordered colon, diathesis).

Medical materialism seems indeed a good appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover.

is the wrong-headed explaining away of religious rules against defilement by attributing them to practical hygiene rules for avoiding disease.

Douglas borrows the William James term medical materialism to label the gloss given by some commentators to the effect that religious rules against defilement are at bottom practical hygiene rules for avoiding disease. An example she gives of medical materialism in this sense is the claim that religious rules about not eating pork stem from the consideration that it is not safe to do so in hot climates. . . ..Douglas sees the possible medical benefits to be derived from religious rules against defilement as happy side effects and dismisses purely medical explanations even when supplied by believers themselves. Unfortunately, the anthropologist's reasoning here does not emerge clearly.' (net).

medical materialism, n.All

medical materialism