Article August 22, 1914 Issue

My attention has been called to a report in your paper of...

Robert S. Ross—New York, N. Y.

The Evening Sun

My attention has been called to a report in your paper of the death in Brooklyn of Mrs.—, in which you stated that she had been having Christian Science treatment, and that the coroner's office was making an investigation. In this connection, permit us to call attention to the fact that one of today's New York papers had a list of one hundred and twenty deaths in the usual column used for that purpose. This may be regarded as an average daily record. In New York state during the year 1913, approximately one hundred thousand deaths occurred, nearly half of them children. With but an insignificant number of exceptions, all these occurred under some form or other of medical treatment.

Our purpose in giving these figures is not to decry the medical profession, but to show how unreasonable it is for the medical societies to make a cry about an isolated failure on the part of a Christian Scientist and ask for an "investigation," when the number of failures of materia medica is legion. Fortunately for medical practitioners, public thought has been educated for centuries to say "Amen" when people die under medical treatment. Such deaths are "regular." Others are classed as "irregular." Thus, unless one dies a la mode, his practitioner is haled to court for "practising medicine without a license," and his family is unjustly barrassed and humiliated by absured newspaper "stories."

These attacks on Christian Science are made, not because of its failures, but because of its successes. If Christian Science had not succeeded in most cases, its followers would long ago have been overwhelmed by public opinion. But the fact is, that the Christian Science movement is made up largely of those who have been healed by Christian Science after having been given up as hopeless and incurable by other systems of healing. At the present time, unfortunate as it may be, the state recognizes, sanctions, and financially supports one school of medicine, and through so-called health laws is forcing the views of this school upon the public, classing as outlaws all other systems of healing. The state might just as well recognize, sanction, and support one system of religion, for state religion is no more unconstitutional than state medicine. Yet state religion would not be tolerated.

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