Dignity

What is dignity?  It seems a simple question.  Merriam-Webster calls it the quality of being worthy, honored, or esteemed, also seriousness of manner, appearance, or language.    So dignity is something a person has, and something a person can be treated with.  What gives a person dignity?  Who should be treated with dignity?

Freak Show

 

    Di at Doctor and Covenants pointed me to this story, where a brain surgeon was operating to remove a mass from a patient and and ended up finding a foot.  The story states that this is either a rare type of tumor called a teratoma or is it a rare case of a twin that remained attached to the patients and was totally enveloped into the skull, a condition called fetus in fetu.

         The image is striking, and gives a certain visceral reaction, which is largely why pictures like this make their rounds on the internet. 

Putting the pieces together again

    As mind/brain and spirit/body dualism have slowly broken down over the past century, puzzling consequences have been left in its wake.  Nowhere are these consequences more evident than in psychology and neurology.  We take seriously the charge to heal the mind and the brain.  We research it, learn about it, ponder over it, all in the hope that someday we will be able to cure illnesses that are currently untouchable. 

Dementia, Schizophrenia, Stroke, Traumatic Brain injury, to name just a few all have permanent and dire consequences for the individuals involved.  The individual’s very mind, consciousness, personhood, spirit, whatever you choose to call it–their very essence or being is changed,  irreversibly at present, by the disease.  To have a sick brain is to become less human in a very real sense.