Article April 8, 1996 Issue

Health is inevitable; contagion is not!

Kay Ramsdell Olson

We'd probably chuckle at the notion that one could catch good health from someone else. Yet, the founder of this magazine, Mary Baker Eddy, writes regarding one facing contagion, "If he believed as sincerely that health is catching when exposed to contact with healthy people, he would catch their state of feeling quite as surely and with better effect than he does the sick man's" (Miscellaneous Writings, p. 229).

To believe that one can catch disease may seem natural—but it isn't. This belief grows out of human customs and the habit of thinking about ourselves as vulnerable to evil. In a sense, we have been educated to believe that sickness and contagion are normal. Mrs. Eddy's major work, Science and Health, teaches the way to overcome this false education and to defend oneself from its bad effects.

This book explains that the underlying cause of all sickness, whatever its characteristics, is fear. So the first thing to do in prayerfully defending ourselves from disease is to eliminate fear. Science and Health states, "Always begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients" (p. 411).

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