Overview

What if medicine could end dying-not symbolically, but literally? Immortality and Afterlife: The Medical Quest to Defeat Death and Redefine the Soul traces the oldest human obsession-the refusal to die-across centuries of science, theology, and invention. Bill Johns explores how the dream of eternal life migrated from temples to laboratories, transforming from myth to mechanism. The result is a sweeping narrative of wonder and warning, revealing what is gained and what is lost when technology begins to rewrite the boundaries of being itself. From the pyramids of Egypt to the operating theaters of modern hospitals, from the resurrection stories of Christianity to the cryogenic vaults of Silicon Valley, Johns follows the evolution of immortality as idea and industry. He shows how early anatomists replaced mystery with mechanism, how Enlightenment rationalists promised salvation through reason, and how contemporary bioengineers pursue digital resurrection through code and machine learning. In every age, the quest to outlive death has carried both reverence and hubris-the will to preserve what we love, and the fear of admitting that all things must end. Drawing on theology, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, Johns examines the shifting boundary between soul and self, showing how the medical conquest of mortality has redefined what it means to be human. Through the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Simone Weil, and Hans Jonas, he uncovers a counter-tradition of moral humility-one that sees limitation not as failure but as form. His prose moves between history and reflection, between the tangible achievements of modern medicine and the spiritual hunger that drives them. Immortality and Afterlife confronts the paradox of progress: the more we preserve the body, the more we risk losing the soul. The drive to defeat death, Johns argues, arises not from arrogance but from longing-for connection, for remembrance, for the impossible promise that love might never be interrupted. Yet in chasing permanence, civilization risks creating a future without meaning. Without endings, there can be no stories; without loss, no tenderness; without death, no life worth continuing. Part history, part moral meditation, this book examines how a species that once prayed for heaven learned to build its own. Bill Johns writes with empathy and precision about the dreamers, scientists, and believers who sought eternity through design. In the end, he suggests, the victory over death may reveal not human triumph but human forgetfulness-the loss of proportion that once made existence sacred. At once elegant and unsettling, Immortality and Afterlife offers a profound reflection on what it means to live, to end, and to belong again to the rhythm that created us.

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