Editorial October 7, 1939 Issue

What Is Health?

George Shaw Cook

A group of physicians, including some of the most prominent members of the medical profession in Great Britain, sent to a conference recently held in the United States a message which included a statement to the effect that fear, self-indulgence, jealousy, and resentment are causes of disease. As reported by the press, the message also contained the following declaration: "Our immediate task is to teach patients that health is not mere absence of disease but includes a moral and spiritual foundation for life."

It is no disparagement of these enlightened physicians to say that over sixty years ago Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, wrote in the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 404), "Hatred, envy, dishonesty, fear, and so forth, make a man sick, and neither material medicine nor Mind can help him permanently, even in body, unless it makes him better mentally, and so delivers him from his destroyers."

Doubtless the leaven of spiritual truth in human consciousness has made it possible for intelligent, thoughtful persons, like the physicians above mentioned, to arrive at the conclusion that there are many erroneous mental states which result in so-called physical disease. The physicians have probably reached this conclusion mainly through observation, research, and experimentation, whereas Mrs. Eddy's final conclusions were the result of spiritual enlightenment, revealing to her the nature of the human mind and its phenomena.

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