The Soul in the Scalpel: Why Modern Medicine Needs Mystics in the Room
Somewhere between the fluorescent glare of the operating theatre and the blank template of the clinical intake form, the soul went missing. We scrubbed up, dissected, intubated, prescribed, and procedured it into absence. And while there’s no ICD code for spirit-loss, the fallout is papalpable: Patients who don’t feel seen, clinicians burning out by the wardful, and institutions more preoccupied with performance metrics than with meaning.
But here’s the thing. Illness isn’t just pathology. Death isn’t just an outcome. And healing, real healing, has never been solely the domain of biochemistry and surgical steel. Somewhere in our race to become better technicians, we forgot how to be witnesses. How to be reverent. How to hold space for the ineffable.
And that is why modern medicine needs mystics in the room.
When the Body Isn’t Just a Body
My first cadaveric specimen was a partial torso from a man about sixty. He had liver damage and pronounced spinal curvature. As a young anatomy student, I was trained to treat him with respect, but also to turn that respect into objectivity. Don’t anthropomorphise. Don’t attribute a story. Definitely don’t ask who he loved or what he feared.
But I did. I always did.
Because a body on a table is never just a body. It is memory, kinship, belief, hunger, grief, and ancestry. It is the echo of every daily ritual it ever participated in. It is a site of knowledge as much as a subject of study. And when we flatten it into a learning tool without acknowledging the personhood that once inhabited it, we train more than just the hands. We condition the heart to detach.
The Clinical Gaze and the Erasure of Meaning
Michel Foucault wrote about “the clinical gaze” as a detached, objectifying way of seeing patients: The body as a machine and symptoms as mechanical errors. It’s a worldview designed for efficiency and clarity, and in many ways, it has saved lives. But it has also amputated context. It has failed to make space for pain that isn’t easily diagnosed or resolved, and it has certainly failed to hold space for death that isn’t clean or convenient.
You can see it in hospitals where dying patients are treated like system errors. You can hear it in surgical teams who refer to patients by procedure rather than by name. You can feel it in medical education that still teaches how to “break bad news” without ever teaching how to hold grief.
And perhaps most alarmingly, you can feel it in the way many practitioners, even the kindest among them, are made to believe that spiritual work belongs in a separate department. That it is optional. Peripheral. If it is included at all, it’s often outsourced to the chaplaincy team in a brisk, checkbox fashion, offered like an afterthought, instead of being woven into the very fabric of care.
Death as a Threshold, Not a Failure
I’ve sat beside dying people. Some in hospital beds, tethered to machines that beeped on long after consciousness left the building. Some at home, surrounded by family and candlelight. Some with elaborate ritual, others in stark silence. And what I’ve learned is that death is not something to “manage.” It is something to midwife.
To witness someone at the edge of life is to hold space for mystery. It’s not always beautiful. It’s not always meaningful. But it always matters. And what makes it bearable, what makes it holy, is the presence of those who know how to stay when there is nothing left to fix.
That presence doesn’t require incense or chanting or belief in the afterlife. What it requires is attunement. Compassion. Capacity to tolerate unfixable pain. And a refusal to turn away from the deep, animal truths of the body.
This is the domain of the mystic. And it has a place in medicine.
Medical School Needs Mystics, Too
Imagine a surgical curriculum that required students to sit with their cadaver before dissection, not just to label organs, but to speak aloud their gratitude. Imagine a clinical placement where the patient narrative was taught not as a case history, but as a lived cosmology of experience. Imagine asking future doctors to learn how to identify existential pain alongside differential diagnoses.
It’s not impossible. In fact, we used to do it. Traditional healers, shamans, midwives, bone-setters, wise women… they all practiced a form of medicine that didn’t separate the wound from the story. That didn’t view the psyche as separate from the flesh. That didn’t scoff at mystery, but leaned into it.
In our rush to professionalise healing, we have sterilised the soul out of it. And our patients are not just noticing, they are starving for something more whole.
We Need the Ghosts in the Room
There’s a reason families whisper to the dying even when they’re unconscious. There’s a reason the air shifts when a last breath leaves the body. There’s a reason we touch our chest when we say “me.” The body remembers what textbooks have foforgotten: That we are not just collections of cells. We are relationships. Stories. Patterns. And when medicine makes no space for that, it fails, even when it succeeds.
Reintegration doesn’t mean turning every doctor into a priest or every nurse into a death doula. But it does mean cultivating reverence. It means building systems that treat the patient as a being, not a burden. It means inviting the mystic, not as an interloper or woo-woo afterthought , but as someone who reminds us what the healing professions were always supposed to be about.
How Do We Start?
If you're in healthcare, hold your patients’ stories with the same care you hold their test results. Sit with grief when it shows up. Respect the bodies you touch. Advocate for ritual even when it makes the bureaucracy nervous.
If you're a patient, ask for meaning alongside medicine. Bring your beliefs into the room. Let your ancestors sit by the bed with you.
If you're neither, support the integration of holistic care into public health systems. Vote for policies that allow time and space for care that isn’t just clinical. Reclaim the art of showing up for the dying not with platitudes, but with presence.
Medicine Without Mystery is Just Mechanics
This isn’t about religion. It’s not about prescribing belief. It’s about remembering that humans are more than their symptoms. That healing sometimes happens in the silence. That death is not a diagnostic failure but a sacred transition.
No amount of precision will ever replace presence.
So yes, I believe modern medicine needs mystics in the room.
Because sometimes what saves us isn’t the scalpel. It’s the soul that dares to stay with us, to witness the most raw and vulnerable parts of life… and death.