In spite of the contemporary theory relative to microscopic...

Utica (N. Y.) Press

In spite of the contemporary theory relative to microscopic life, materia medica is as far as ever from explaining the final origin and ultimate source of disease, and from having found a scientific cure. There are not less diseases to-day than there were before this theory was promulgated. Nor is it "absurd to say that any mental state on the part of the patient can have any influence over the life of these destructive agents," for Christian Science treatment, which alters the mental attitude of the patient, has healed every one of the diseases enumerated as due to microscopic life. It is a matter of record in the annals of Christian Science, during the more than thirty years of its work before the public, that hundreds of cancers have been cured by its ministrations. In fact, it is principally the so-called incurable cases which come to Christian Science as a last resort, having first tried everything else available, in vain. It may be granted that seventy-five per cent, or even eighty per cent, of all cases would cure themselves if left alone, and that "in acute ephemeral diseases, like colds, chickenpox, measles, scarlet fever, etc., the universal law is that they are self-limiting, and when they run a natural course in a healthy person, the tendency is to a spontaneous cure." But experience shows that the cures of Christian Science are performed principally among the twenty-five per cent or twenty per cent which are not supposed to be self-curing or to come under "the universal law" of self-limitation, but, on the contrary, are reckoned as leading to death, if left to themselves.

Christian Scientists do not desire to urge their views upon others or to infringe in any way upon the medical practice of devoted and honored physicians. It goes without saying that they refer all those who may desire material medicine to those qualified and licensed to administer it. But they believe, and the fruits of their work prove their contention, that they have a better, safer, and surer way of meeting the ills to which flesh is heir than the material means more commonly used.

W. D. McCrackan.
Utica (N. Y.) Press.

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