The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying by Jeffrey Bishop is an absorbing analysis of how contemporary medicine’s epistemology and metaphysics relate to the dying body and death in a biomedical context. From the perspectives of medicine, philosophy, and history, Bishop’s powerful synthesis is aimed at medicine’s attainment of power and efficient control over life, death, and dying in the twentieth century. Moreover, his thesis can aptly be interpreted as a counter to the arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens who have declared religion the loser in the centuries old war between science and religion. 

The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying by Jeffrey Bishop is an absorbing analysis of how contemporary medicine’s epistemology and metaphysics relate to the dying body and death in a biomedical context. From the perspectives of medicine, philosophy, and history, Bishop’s powerful synthesis is aimed at medicine’s attainment of power and efficient control over life, death, and dying in the twentieth century. Moreover, his thesis can aptly be interpreted as a counter to the arguments of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens who have declared religion the loser in the centuries old war between science and religion.