Article May 9, 1908 Issue

There are doubtless many medical men who would be...

Walter Wilding, M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.,

The Onlooker

There are doubtless many medical men who would be willing to concede that Christian Scientists, by helping patients to a happier, brighter, and more wholesome frame of mind, heal those types of disease which the profession looks upon as hysterical, imaginative, due to abuse in dieting. overfeeding, and excessive drinking, i.e., disordered conditions, purely mental in origin: whereas few would seriously entertain the claim of Christian Scientists that this same power heals all manner of disease: in fact, there seems to be a fairly general feeling that it is presumptuous to make such a claim. My own experience on these lines has been most definite. As a doctor practising medicine. I had periodically under my care, for six or seven years, a case of valvular disease of the heart, complicated with diseased conditions in other organs, the ravages of each year leaving the patient in a worse condition — until a fatal termination appeared to be near.

At this stage of apparent helplessness and hopelessness the prayers of a Christian Scientist were called for. and through them the patient was healed. The healing was complete, has been permanent, and the life has since then been one of great physical energy and activity, full of brightness, happiness, andjoy. This was a case which not only the few medical men who attended it. but practically the whole profession, would have acknowledged as one of incurable disease, and yet a Christian Scientist healed it by a purely mental process, by that understanding of the efficacy of prayer typed by Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus: "Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me." — the prayer of faith. — the prayer that knows the availability of the omnipotent power and goodness of our heavenly Father, God, from whom man derives all that he is.

There is a wide difference in the treatment of such a case under medicine and under Christian Science. The former views diseased matter as a real, substantial fact, whilst, on the other hand. Christian Science sees the diseased condition as mental in origin, substance, and nature. The one treats with material remedies, and the other changes the mental belief in the disease. Again, medicine, having more or less conceded the incurable nature of such disease, limits its efforts to dealing with symptoms and effects, not attempting even to investigate any other than a material condition, and consequently confirms the prejudged belief in incurability, and the patient is left to look for permanent relief only in death. Christian Science, on the contrary, deals directly with the real cause, the mental cause. It sees the disease as a condition of thought, and proceeds to change this diseased thought by an understanding of that Mind "which, was also in Christ Jesus," and which heals now as surely as in the time Jesus was on earth. Is it presumptous, then, to believe that the transformation of thought resulting from this overcoming of the fleshly mind or consciousness of disease by the operation of the divine Mind, through prayer, is the process of healing which St. Paul meant when he said: "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind"?

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