The Beloved Physicians

Today St. Luke is known as the author of the third Gospel of the New Testament, but two thousand years ago he was Lucanus, a Greek, a man who loved, knew the emptiness of bereavement, and later traveled through the hills and wastes of Judea asking, "What manner of man was my Lord?" And it is of this Lucanus that Taylor Caldwell tells here in one of the most stirring stories ever lived or written.

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone? In Taming the Beloved Beast, esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst. Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.

I had always believed in the healing power of our Lord, and viewed my life as one of service to Him via the practice of medicine. But, in retrospect, I had a deeper trust in the power of modern medicine and science than I did in Jesus Christ and His fully accomplished work on the Cross. My thinking was flawed, but, as I grew in my walk with the Lord and meditated on Scripture more fully, I began to see the superiority of faith over the limited interventions modern medical science had to offer, and that this interplay between faith and science was not mutually exclusive, but complimentary, for the spiritual aspects of our lives illuminate and empower the carnal aspects of intellect and physical senses. I began jotting notes to myself related to this interplay of faith and healing and science, and just filed them away...for years. IThen, in December of 2017, a baby was born to a first time mother of mine, his little body riddled with the most fulminant form of acute lymphoblasic leukemia, almost always fatal. His absolutely miraculous healing was the impetus to start putting these thoughts into writing, in the form of weekday morning emails entitled “A Christian Doctor’s View of Healing, Faiith, and Science”. It was soon made clear to me that these writings were to take the form of a year long devotional book, comprised of short weekday messages that are intimately linked, such that they can be read through as a book. And that book was to paint a picture, and that picture was to be of a face, and the face was to be that of Jesus, for He is the source of all healing