Article June 12, 1926 Issue

The irrelevant caption, "A Military Christian Scientist,"...

Ralph G. Lindstrom, Committee on Publication for the State of Colorado,—Denver

Colorado Medicine

The irrelevant caption, "A Military Christian Scientist," which was given to an article in your recent issue, quoting a barber-surgeon of the sixteenth century military life, in remarks about medical quacks tearing into strips the shirt of a wounded nobleman, placing the strips crosswise on the wounds, eating a diet of prunes, and so forth, in unsuccessful treatment of the latter's wounds, can have no other purpose than invidious comparison. In consonance with your usual fairness will you please give space to this reply?

The article indicates that the nobles had personal physicians, but that the common soldiers had barber-surgeons or adventurers for their sole reliance. Further, it would seem from the article that a nobleman had been wounded and felt it necessary to turn successively from his personal physician, no doubt of the then orthodox school, to the barber, and then to the tearer-of-shirts and vicarious eater-of-prunes for relief. It seems clear that the nobleman would not have turned from his physician had he been afforded satisfactory relief. Likewise, it is apparent that the hundreds of thousands of highly intelligent people are turning to Christian Science (and being healed), after fruitless search for relief elsewhere.

It requires little unbiased knowledge of Christian Science to see that tearing of shirts and vicarious eating of prunes are at least as far removed from Christian Science practice as they can be from accepted medical practice. And Christian Science and accepted medical practice have scarcely anything but sincere effort in common, because the former is a wholly spiritual, and the latter an almost wholly physical method of treatment. Why, then, classify Christian Scientists with quacks in physical practice, when the latter is entirely eschewed in Christian Science healing?

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