Article September 15, 1917 Issue

The one really essential thing to know about malpractice...

The Christian Science Monitor

The one really essential thing to know about malpractice is that there is no such thing. The one essential thing to know about a malpractitioner is that there is no such person. It is not sufficient to say, as Betsey Prig said to Mrs. Gamp, on a famous occasion, of the impalpable Mrs. Harris, "I don't believe there's no such a person;" it is necessary to demonstrate it as a fixed scientific fact. The philosophic mind coming suddenly face to face with such deductions from axioms it has itself laid down, hesitates, recoils, and finally surrenders to the evidence of its senses. Matter, for instance, generations of philosophers have maintained to be unreal. Plato said so, Abelard said so, Berkeley said so, Sir Oliver Lodge says so. Now, if this is true, physical diseases are the result of mind, energy, or some other nonmaterial first cause. But when the philosopher feels sick, what happens? He accepts the evidence of his senses, which, on his own showing, are phenomenal and not noumenal, and with unblushing illogicality proceeds to doctor mind with matter, cause with effect. It was so that Berkeley exalted siris, the humblest drug in the pharmacopoeia, to the status of a universal panacea.

Mrs. Eddy differed from the philosophers,—it might more fairly be said from the soi-disant philosophers, for she was really the first true philosopher since the first century of the Christian era,—inasmuch as she went boldly, step by step, from her axioms to their logical and inevitable conclusions. "That," Jesus had said, "which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Just nineteen hundred years later Mrs. Eddy wrote, on page 9 of "Unity of Good": "What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system? This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God," of Spirit. Again, that which is born of the flesh is mortal, perishing, unreal; and that which is born of the Spirit is spiritual, real, and eternal.

You may argue, ad infinitum, that matter is that as Shakespeare himself said:—

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