A family friend died last year. It fell, in part, to me to sort through his belongings. While helping his widow clean out his desk we found several shoeboxes filled with pills, ointments, powders, and other medications. We also found reams of prescription notes, guidelines for medicine use, doctor’s appointment receipts, results from medical tests, medical histories, and every other conceivable scrap of paper one would accumulate over decades of going in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices.

We knew that the deceased had been taking medicine for diabetes, an enlarged prostate, vertigo, diverticulitis, and other ailments. He was also taking medicines to fight the side-effects of the pills the doctors gave him to counter his pre-existing maladies. But it was shocking to see, all in one place, the volume of substances that doctors were giving my friend. One medicine chasing another medicine, chemicals following chemicals all the way down to the cells.

My friend ended up dying of brain cancer, the diagnosis of which the doctors missed until it was too late. His physicians all thought that his dizzy spells, his odd behavior, his fits of falling came about because he was suffering from the side-effects of other pharmaceuticals. And so, ironically, they didn’t understand that he was being killed by an aggressive and murderous growth apparently unrelated to his chronic illnesses. It seems the doctors had become so accustomed to thinking of my friend in terms of the medicines they had prescribed him that they could no longer envision him as a human being, a living organism with a commandment to survive that transcends the interactions of molecules.

I have a feeling that my late friend is not the only human person whom doctors have seen as a medicine man, a pincushion for shots, a disposal for pharmacological inventions. Health is metaphysical, a measure of the fulness of created being. Humans are God’s work, ultimately inexplicable in chemical terms. Shorn of metaphysics, however, modern physicians (the name is instructive) view the body as a chemical process, a structure of muscle and bone, a highly complex robot to be kept functioning as a substitute for being made well.

Introducing one chemical into the system sets off a series of reactions, some of which can be controlled by other chemicals. Bloodwork readouts let the physician know what other chemicals should be mixed in to get the data points back within acceptable ranges. This is how doctors see medicine man, the strange simulacrum of us mortals whose souls, whose hearts, are simply not legible in any MRI or X-ray. When we go to the doctor, what he or she sees is very different than how we see ourselves, or how God sees us. We are not homo medicus. We are homo sapiens, made not by pharmaceutical companies but in the image and likeness of God.

Only one doctor, to my knowledge, leveled with my friend’s wife about his prognosis. It was after my friend had collapsed from the brain cancer no doctor had suspected and been rushed to the hospital, after a biopsy, after chemotherapy treatments had failed to stop the cancer from spreading. The doctor, an Indian man whose compassion shone out from behind his formidable intellect, told my friend’s wife that things were not going well, and that she should prepare herself for the worst. Only one doctor acknowledged that my friend was mortal, that he was going to die, and that chemicals had no dominion over his final day.

My friend was not medicine man after all. He was human. He died last summer, died as we all must, for “all flesh is as the grass.” Whither his soul went, I do not know. His body lies in the earth now, medicines and all.