Article June 25, 1910 Issue

In its February issue Good Health has seen fit to make...

Charles K. Skinner

Battle Creek (Mich.) Enquirer

In its February issue Good Health has seen fit to make some very radical statements regarding Christian Science, in connection with an article by an English doctor, taken from a New York magazine. We hope the writer was conscientious in his position. We would like to believe that his misstatements regarding Christian Science sprang from the head and not the heart. We are told that "the grave fault with Christian Science is, that it deceives and misleads men and women as to their ailments, by destroying their faith in rational [material] remedies," etc.

The most superficial observation and inquiry would show that the patient usually comes to the Christian Science practitioner after all his hope has vanished under the care of the doctor. What he does bring is a woebegone countenance and a list of diagnoses, shorter or longer, in accord with the number of doctors who have failed to reach his case. The Christian Scientist by no means ignoes the diagnosis of the doctor from the material standpoint, but goes to work to relieve just what the patient believes troubles him, but he does so from the understanding that all discords, functional, organic, and nervous, are primarily mental. He insists on care, comfort, wholesome food, fresh air, cleanliness, and above all, cheerfulness. His main point of difference from the material doctor is that he believes in the omnipotence of God to heal "all our diseases," even as the Scriptures declare, instead of pinning his faith to inert drugs and the operating-table.

The doctor to whom Good Health refers, says he sent out a drag-net in England for failures in Christian Science, and seemingly not being satisfied with the results, sent to this country for more; and he tells us that he "got in all a long list of killed and wounded." He forgot to mention, however, that most of the people in his "list" had failed to realize any help under medical treatment before they applied to Christian Science. Another point which he overlooked, in his haste, is that according to statistics fifty millions of people on this sphere die every year, more than one hundred and forty thousand each day, and a very large proportion of them under the very treatment the doctor advocates.

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