ABSTRACT
Medicine rightly claims to realize one of humanity's oldest dreams. In the course of investigation of the basic ground of this development, the commodification of the human body has proven to be a continuation of that ground. Human sacrifice has been sublimated, but the market and medicine bear its marks, blatantly in the case of the recent commodification of the human body. The opposition of economic and theological motifs in the controversy over this commodification causes us to neglect their common source of power. With modern medicine, which objectifies the human body to a great extent in both people's concrete experience and in its economic use as a resource, the introversion of sacrifice reaches its endpoint. Salvific and tradable goods coincide once again in the human body as a commodified body. The incorporation of commodity-producing society found the foreign body in Europe as well.
