LETTERS TO THE PRESS

from Christian Science Committees on Publication

Northern California Union, Sacramento

It is with interest that I read the item in a recent issue of your paper headed "Cancer Doctors Probe Value of Fear Campaign." It is also encouraging to read that at the annual meeting of the American Cancer Society in New York question was raised "whether the campaign of fear of death is the best way to save lives in cancer."

Reading the reports of medical associations in recent years which emphasize the importance of fear as a cause of disease, I am sure many laymen have wondered why the same associations would advocate fear as a means of curing disease.

One cannot help being reminded of the statement Dr. Karl Menninger, director of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, made at the convention of the American College of Physicians in San Francisco last April. As reported in The San Francisco Chronicle of April 20, 1948, Dr. Menninger said, "The tendency is to assume that sick patients can be treated like automobiles—passed down an assembly line of specialists and workers for a punch here and wrench there—without the guiding principle of an over-all perspective."

Such would seem to be the assumption in the cancer and other fear campaigns.

Job said, "The thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me" (Job 3:25). And I am sure that many people have had Job's experience. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, has clearly shown the error of a fear campaign. In the Christian Science textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she writes (p. 373), "The fear of disease and the love of sin are the sources of man's enslavement." And again (p.395), "Mental practice, which holds disease as a reality, fastens disease on the patient, and it may appear in a more alarming form."

While we appreciate the sincere efforts of the Cancer Society to help free mankind from cancer, we must say that their present methods are ill advised and defeat their purpose. The following words of the disciple John would seem to indicate the folly of the fear campaign and also to indicate the method that will free mankind from all disease: "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."

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