Article June 25, 1910 Issue

In the very fair notice of Mr. Paget's book in your...

Frederick Dixon—London.

Health Record

In the very fair notice of Mr. Paget's book in your current issue you say truly that, in spite of his skepticism, Christian Science workers do heal the sick, and that it would be more in accordance with common sense to try to find out how they accomplish these cures than to harp upon their failures. Will you allow me a little space in which to attempt to show that medical science, tested by Mr. Paget's standar, would be in precisely the same position as that to which he tries to relegate Christian Science, and also to explain the unsoundness of the evidence on which he has based his statistics of Christian Science failures.

Mr. Paget has tabulated a considerable number of cases, in some of which he claims that he has shown the insufficiency of the evidence of Christian Science healing, and in others the disastrous effects incidental to it. The value of this evidence is illustrated by the fact that nearly all his examples are given without any corroboration whatever, and with scarcely a single indication which would enable anybody to test the truth of one of them. He might have sat down and written them out of his own head for all the proof he has advanced in their support. In a very few instances in which he has afforded any clue, his information has proved to be valueless and his conclusions incorrect. Let me take a single case as an example. He gives the case of a child who fell from a window, and he goes at some length into the horro of treating this child in Christian Science instead of having it treated by an ordinary doctor. At this point he breaks off the recital, instead of carrying on the story to its natural conclusion, which explains that the child was healed, without any surgical aid, in an incredible short space of time. In giving these cases Mr. Paget has stated that they have been taken consecutively from the Christian Science publications. It can only be said that Mr. Paget's definition of consecutive is scarcely that of the man in the street. The man in the street would, it is to be suspected, have described them as selected. The difference is considerable, and is itself the strongest proof of the weakness of Mr. Paget's argument. Even, however, if every instance could be substantiated, it would do nothing to make good his argument. He understands, it is to be presumed, the meaning of begging the question, and it is distinctly begging the question to assume that there would have been less pain and less death if, accepting his facts as genuine, the cases he alludes to had been treated in an ordinary way. As a matter of fact, an enormous number of cases treated in Christian Science never come into the hands of Christian Scientists until they have been given up as hopeless by the doctors in charge of them. Mr. Paget knows perfectly well the truth about the physical diagnosis of disease. He knows that thirty-one hundred and eleven cases of mistaken diagnosis were admitted to the isolation hospitals of the metropolitan asylums board in the course of one year, and that this is the merest fraction of the cases of wrong diagnosis in the metropolitan area. Some time ago, when I pointed this out to him, and specifically alluded to the fact that these thirty-one hundred and eleven cases were only those admitted by the asylums board, he replied by saying that, divided up among the metropolitan doctors, this worked out to less than half a mistake per annum each. He has evidently the mildest opinion of the intelligence of his readers. It is to be suspected that if the number of patients sent to the isolation hospitals by every metropolitan doctor was subtracted from the number of cases diagnosed by him in a year, it would not amount to more than half a per cent of his practice.

It would be interesting to know—only, unfortunately, it is impossible—what the total number of wrong diag noses in the metropolitan area really does amount to. Even if we knew this, innumerable other questions would remain to be asked. Sir Victor Horsley, for instance, has admitted that if there were inquests on all the patients who die after operations there would be ten thousand of these inquests in London in a year. It is not surprising that there is in some quarters a desire to limit the coroner's authority. The existence of these cases is none the less a fact, which may help to account for the statement of Sir Almroth Wright that the method of extirpating microbes by the knife would be finally given up. The same speaker declared that it was useless to look to drugs to kill microbes in the interior of the body—a remark which seems like a belated affirmation of the pronouncement of Dr. Mason Good that the effects of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain, except, indeed, that it has already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine, all combined. Considering these things, it is a little unreasonable of the medical opponents of Christian Science to be sure that they are right, and Christian Scientists, at the best, threatened, in Mr. Paget's pleasing phrase, with downright madness.

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