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

37 страница из 53

‘Rather let me die than make me undergo an operation’ is the not infrequent remark of the highly-strung sufferer. And then comes in all the sympathy, tact, and good breeding of the surgeon. He will gently explain matters, will show how the disease is such that nothing short of removal of the growth holds out the least chance of life or the avoidance of later severe pain, and will state, what is the truth, that the operation, short and sharp, will give years of freedom from suffering even if it does not completely remove all trace of the trouble. How bewildered the patient will feel! He has been hoping against hope that his malady is only a slight one, and that it may be ‘dispersed’ by some magic of physic, and now his hopes have been rudely mocked and shattered. Surely here, if ever, help from an outside source is needed and should be welcomed. But such help must be rational, based on truth, and fearing not the consequences.

Supposing the disease is cancer, what awaits him if the sufferer flies to the quack and is befooled till all hope of successful treatment is gone? Or rushes to the Christian Scientist, who, with seeming bona fides, avers there is no such thing as a cancer cell! The eye that has seen it a hundred times under the microscope, and can recognise it amongst a hundred other varieties, does not exist in the purblind conception of such a ‘Scientist,’ for the cell is matter, it cannot exist, and neither for the same reasoning, if consistency is maintained, can the eye which sees the cell exist, for it also is material.