Medicine + Religion = A Really Bad Idea

When it comes to Romania’s problems with its medical system, it’s hard to decide which one’s the biggest: you have doctors migrating by the thousands, you have horrible hospital conditions that often cause the people who get admitted to get out even sicker than they came, you have an unhealthy, bribery-smeared organisational culture within hospitals.

And lately you have the wing of Christian medicine that’s on the rise.

Doctors that follow this form of “Christian medicine” typically endorse the apparent health benefits of prayer and fasting, advocated by the Church, while sharing the Church’s view of abortion, contraception and homosexuality as grave sins.

In a country where 10,000 women died because abortion was banned for 23 years during communism, to now have doctors who oppose pregnancy termination freely willed is, to put it mildly, oblivious.

The article describes a religious retreat in rural Transylvania, where camps are organized for doctors and medical students. It gives a very precise account of what’s happening in Romanian society in terms of the nationalism wave that’s sweeping through it (as it is in other Europeans nations). What’s also really interesting in this article is that it points out that orthodox nationalism and medicine have quite a history in Romania.

In the early 20th century, Romanian universities and medical schools were a breeding ground for ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic ideologies. In 1922, students at the medical school in Cluj forbade their Jewish classmates — who made up half the class — from performing autopsies on the bodies of Christians. The unrest that followed eventually led to proposals for limiting the number of Jewish students in universities.