New forthcoming book from Nathan Carlin


By Angela Gomez, McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics
September 1, 2020

Nathan Carlin, PhD, received a contract from Oxford University Press to write a monograph on medicine and secularization. Its tentative title is How Doctors Became Our Priests: Sacralizations and Secularizations of Medicine, and it will explore observations by sociologists and anthropologists regarding similarities between medicine and religion (e.g., clergy wear black robes, while doctors wear white coats; clergy are concerned with the salvation of souls, while doctors repair bodies; religion offers communal creeds, while medicine has the Hippocratic Oath) in light of recent developments in secularization theory. When complete, this will be Carlin’s 10th book.