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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This being my view, I would try to eliminate notions of the priest as medicine man; they are essentially pagan, though to this day they more or less unconsciously influence our thoughts on the present subject.

But, it may be said, strange healings do take place under religious influences; and this is true. And at no time in history were such miraculous cures more frequent and wonderful than in the temples of Aesculapius or of Serapis. Modern cures, whether of the Eddyites or at Lourdes, or the like elsewhere, when compared with those of the Roman Empire fall into insignificance. Now a careful study of all reported cures of this miraculous or miraculoid kind, a study illustrated for us many years ago by Charcot, proved to him, and proves to the expert observers of to-day, that they all—palsies, convulsions and the rest, often inveterate cases—are and have been cures of one disease, and of one only, namely hysteria; a malady which in its protean manifestations mocks all and any particular diseases. I say this of the genuine cases; but the majority of such wonders recorded turn out on inquiry (like the ‘Grimsby’ case) to be grossly exaggerated or wholly false. The ‘miraculous cures’ then, so far as they are genuine, are cures by suggestion: they take their place with cures of the same kind of disorder by panic, such as an alarm of fire; by ‘hypnotism,’ or by any other over-mastering impression which startles or transports the balance of the bodily functions from one centre of equilibrium to another higher and more stable one.