07/09/2025
Brent Waters, DPhil, "In Praise of Mundane Healthcare," the Third Annual Virtue Ethics Lecture, from our 32nd Annual Conference, "Living in the Biotech Century: The First 25 Years"
https://www.youtube.com/live/5SllIdxkkfs?si=jlcpqfe3DExejKVV
The lecture is prompted by the question: When and why did contemporary healthcare take a wrong turn? In the lecture, I unpack the reasons for asking this question, but in the meantime, the short answer is that healthcare took a wrong turn when it tried to become exciting, even extraordinary, at the expense of the ordinary and commonplace. This turn is not in keeping with customary medical care, in which physicians focused their attention on the mundane functions of embodied patients.
In short, the body was an object of care. In contrast, contemporary healthcare has, in part, responded to consumers annoyed with uncooperative bodies that impede and frustrate their desires.
Increasingly, medical fixes are devised not only for treating illness and disability, but also for treating the “disease” of aging. Medical attention is effectively redirected from ordinary daily life toward achieving extraordinary outcomes. The body is no longer an object of care but a problem to be solved, and this transition is not proving to be good or beneficial. In brief, the voracious consumption of extraordinary medical goods and services is not necessarily promoting human flourishing. What is needed in response to this wrong turn is a recovery of mundane healthcare, and I suggest several virtues that might assist both healthcare providers and recipients in undertaking this retrieval.
