Abstract
Treating Body and Soul is a narrative anthology of textured accounts by medical clinicians on how they attempt to address both the “body and soul,” the physical and spiritual dimensions of care. Uniquely, the volume includes the voices from a diverse span of practices including mental health, pediatrics, radiology, gynecology, bioethics, and palliative care.
The book is the inspiration of its editor, Peter Wells, who serves as an Anglican priest and Lead Chaplain at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, Brighton, England. Wells set out to compile a volume of reflections that respond to the question: How do clinicians “engage with their patients in order to bring together their physical and spiritual needs?” Specifically, the pages illustrate, in each clinician's own experience, how they define what “spiritual” means and its relevance to treatment and practice. Each chapter reveals how the writer elicits the spiritual material behind patients' symptoms to move closer to whole-person care.
The book is a snapshot in time. It is a special glimpse into how spirituality and spiritual care are currently understood by some in the healthcare field in the United Kingdom. It is also a rare read into how this dimension is being conceptualized across subspecialties. Because the reflections do not start from the more traditional healthcare chaplain's view or are constricted by primary assumptions about the topic, they appear to mirror the authentic and common hopes and challenges of their authors. Its strength lies in the diversity of perspectives and the interventions illustrated in its numerous case studies.
The book's guiding question is broad. Since Wells invites each contributor to address it from their own personal and clinical location, we end up with both useful and off-target offerings. A few chapters address spirituality directly with suggested assessments and interventions. In both the chapters Mental Health and Palliative Care in the Community, psychiatrist, Tim Ojo, and palliative care nurses, Rachel Reed and Nigel Spencer, specifically discuss how they assess spiritual need and pain.
Other sections point to a general philosophy of whole person care, are vague, or side step the topic completely. Neonatologist Cathy Garland, in the chapter, Neonatal Care, writes about the emotional and psychological needs of the patient and baby. She stresses skilled communication and family-centered care without addressing spiritual needs at all. In the chapter, Renal, nephrologist, Adam MacDiarmaid-Gordon, describes renal failure and dialysis, concluding the chapter with a list of his general assertions about patient autonomy and shared decision making without mention of spirituality. General topics such as whole person care and engaged listening are certainly related and important in joining the physical and spiritual in practice but do not illuminate the central question specifically. The fact that contributors include dissimilar definitions of spirituality or too general a description to be meaningful can, in places, makes their accounts ambiguous and difficult to operationalize in practice. This definitional limitation is one shared with much of the current literature on spirituality in healthcare in the United States.
Overall, this distinctive compilation is worth a look. Palliative care clinicians will find practical nutrition reading how colleagues professionally consider their own spiritual knowing, assess spiritual causes of physical symptoms, and find the time to welcome patients' inner lives into medical decision making and end-of-life care.
For more detailed case studies with examples of nuanced and expert interventions including reflections from diverse medical fields read Spiritual Care in Practice: Case Studies in Healthcare Chaplaincy, Edited by George Fitchett and Steve Nolan, 2015.
For more empirically informed best practices for engaging the dimension of religion/spirituality, also from distinct fields of medicine, read Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine: From Evidence to Practice, edited by Michael Balboni and John Peteet, 2017.