Editorial February 18, 1939 ISSUE

Cause and Cure of Disease

George Shaw Cook

A psychiatrist connected with a well-known medical school was recently quoted by a New York newspaper as having pointed to hate and fear as contributory causes of a certain type of respiratory disease frequently regarded by doctors of medicine as difficult to cure. On pages 404 and 405 of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," which was first published in 1875, its author, Mary Baker Eddy, says: "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. The basic error is mortal mind."

For more than sixty years students of Christian Science, working from the standpoint that disease has a mental cause, have dealt with mental conditions and not with matter, in the treatment of sickness. While it is often the case that so-called functional and organic diseases have their origin in asserted laws of mortal mind, such as those pertaining to heredity, climate, food, hygiene, and so forth, sickness is more often attributable to such mental states as those mentioned above, especially to fear.

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