Читать книгу Medicine and the Church. Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick онлайн

15 страница из 53

This indictment is a serious one. But then the claims of Mrs. Eddy’s supporters are so portentous that they cannot be lightly dismissed, and we must not forget that, as the Bishop of Birmingham points out in a letter printed further on in this volume, both the Church and the medical profession have played into the hands of Christian Science by ignoring the facts that Mrs. Eddy has been occupied in distorting.

However much it may have been possible in the past for the doctor and the parson in dealing with the less nervous, more easy-going type to look upon him as composed of two distinct and separate parts, body and spirit respectively, having no intimate relationship and amenable to quite different influences, such a view of men and women is to-day out of the question. To entertain it for a moment is to court failure. Mind and matter act and react upon one another, and more than this, without faith all human enterprise would be stultified. Faith plays no less important a part in medical treatment than it does in the more commonplace affairs of life. This aspect of the question cannot be better expressed than it has been recently by Professor Osler.6