Article July 25, 1914 Issue

The appellate division of the supreme court of New York...

The Asheville (N. C.) Citizen

The appellate division of the supreme court of New York last week affirmed the conviction of a Christian Scientist for "prractising medicine without a license." One naturally wonders how an individual could be charrged with practising that which he does not believe in as a weapon against disease. It is a generally accepted belief that the teachings of Christian Science advocate the preservation of health without the agency of medicine and drugs, yet here is a case wherein the courts hold that the Scientist was engaged in actual competition with the medical practitioner—an apparently impossible position.

Aside from this question, however, the New York law is wrong when it virtually puts a monopoly of the art of healing in the hands of the medical world. Whether the healing be done in an office or in a church does not constitute a line of distinction, for other courts have so held, and have held rightly. The Scientist can with all propriety accept a fee for services rendered, whether they be rendered in a church, in the patient's home, or in the home of the healer. Yet the New York decision, as recently rendered, makes the acceptance of a fee a violation of the law. The passing of a fee lends no shade of criminality to the services performed. "If the acceptance of fees," says a leading New York daily, "is held to be the crux of the legality of Christian Science practice, the deduction is inevitable that the law was designed, not for the protection of public health, but to prevent fees from being diverted from the pockets of physicians of the medical schools. This conclusion is not weakened by the fact that in this case—as in many others—the informant was a detective hired by a medical society."

There are many thousands of people in this country who profess Christian Science as a means to health and happiness, to the point that it is their religion. The law which would prohibit that preference cannot be regarded in any other light than an infringement upon that religious liberty which our Constitution guarantees.

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