Article December 4, 1902 Issue

The Contagion of Health

Edward C. Butler

Mexican Herald

To the Editor.

"Catching health" is an admirable way of putting the truth. Your editorial under that heading hit upon a great truth. Health is indeed "catchable, contagious." Sickness has always been more contagious than health because more people have believed in the former than in the latter. But things are changing. The world is so tired of diseases that are not healed and death that is not checked, that it is turning, in its natural quest for remedies, away from materia medica to mental remedies. God is guiding that quest. The Gospel of health and holiness, brought, in His name and by His Son Jesus Christ, is commencing to transform this pain-racked planet of ours.

"Don Malaria," as you style that popular disease, is a lie that nestles in human belief. It is a belief that one day a man has a fever and the next day he has a chill. Man is the image and likeness of God and cannot suffer from inaction, overaction, and reaction; and when he can realize that truth about himself the malaria will disappear. If, as you say, one third of the English-speaking colony in the City of Mexico is in the "iron grasp of Don Malaria," you are simply voicing the old beliefs of the past. Let people stop thinking along such low levels if they would find themselves well and without need of quinine or tonics. Why do not the doctors catch malaria, small-pox, and other contagious diseases? Because they do not fear them. If they will teach their patients not to fear, they can be healed without medicine. The newspapers, too, are to blame for the spread of contagion. They publish names of diseases that only exist in the human thought, giving them real power and place instead of crushing them out of the public thought. They create mental pictures that are manifested in their readers.

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