Article October 29, 1910 Issue

Whether it is wise for jurymen to indulge in newspaper...

Frederick Dixon

Richmond and Twickenham (Eng.) Times

Whether it is wise for jurymen to indulge in newspaper communications after a case has been tried is distinctly doubtful, but since one of the jurymen engaged in the recent inquest has written an anonymous letter to your paper, I am sure you will permit me to reply to him.

First, then, it is an amazing contention that the limits of toleration have been reached when a patient prefers to trust to Christian Science for treatment rather than to ordinary medical help. It is precisely this argument which has been used to defend every phase of persecution. What the juryman fails to see is that he is making his own prejudices the test of what is reasonable. That has been the genesis of persecution in all ages. The juryman goes on to beg the entire question by calmly assuming that, if the patient had had medical treatment, she would have recovered. The patient had had medical treatment, including six operations, until she was terrified of having any more. Then, and not till then, did she decide to accept Christian Science treatment, as a last resort. Seeing the enormous number of people who die every year of cancer, in spite of all the help that the medical profession is able to give them, it is almost indecent to argue that, in the present instance, the patient's life would have been saved by adhering to the ordinary method of treatment.

Finally, the juryman gives evidence of the fact that he is completely ignorant of what Christian Science treatment is, by explaining that it consists "of wishing yourself well, and having faith that it will be so." It would be impossible within the limits of a letter to a paper to attempt any satisfactory explanation of what Christian Science treatment is. It must suffice to say that the description given by the juryman is a complete travesty of anything Christian Science teaches, and is about on a level with the argument of those common-sense materialists who, as Huxley has explained, endeavored to disprove the theory of idealism by stamping on the ground, or some such irrelevant proceeding. A Christian Scientist certainly holds that the material body is the subjective condition of the human mind, and that, this being so, every manifestation of disease must be mentally produced, and can only be destroyed by destroying the mental cause. This is, however, about as far from wishing yourself well, and believing you will get so, as anything it would be humanly possible to conceive.

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