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

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Prejudice against it will be found to exist both in ecclesiastic and in scientific circles. Your book will help to dissipate prejudice by the spread of better-informed opinion. The time, indeed, is opportune. The British Medical Journal of June 18, 1910, has published a series of papers by men ‘who could speak with the highest authority on the relations between mind and body, as exhibited in the phenomena of disease.’ ‘Their opinion,’ as the Journal tells us, ‘serves as an authoritative reminder that there are bodily ills which cannot be cured by pills and potions, but which yield to methods which, for want of a better word, may be called “mental”; that cures which, in a former day, would have been denied by unbelievers and accepted as miracles by the faithful, really happen, and that they can be explained without invoking supernatural intervention.’ On the other hand, we are confident the Church of Christ will never identify itself with charlatan methods which might delude the poor and the ignorant into the superstitious idea that they can be more cheaply and effectively healed by a magic or thaumaturgic ministry, than by the knowledge and skill of trained and certificated doctors and surgeons. To quote our report in the Lambeth Conference of 1908, ‘Medical science is the handmaid of God and His Church’ (N.B. not of His clergy, but of that Body of Christ in which all true callings unite in serving), ‘and should be fully recognised as the ordinary means appointed by Almighty God for the care and healing of the human body.’