INTRODUCTION
II
In the course of gathering opinions from various authoritative sources
on the subject dealt with in this book, I received communications
from Sir Clifford Allbutt, the Hon. Sydney Holland, and a well-known
surgeon, which, though they do not constitute separate treatises, are
so important, not only in view of the distinction of the authors, but
of the broad survey of the subject that they afford, that I venture to
print them as part of the general introduction.
In the case of Sir Clifford Allbutt’s paper I have supplemented it by
an important extract from one of his recent writings.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEDICINE AND RELIGION
The response you are good enough to desire can be but brief, crude,
and, I fear, too blunt; but I have not time for careful consideration.
I can only indicate a few points which occur to me offhand, and taking
much for granted. For instance, I must avoid any discussion of those
antinomies which meet us at every side of human conceptions, and be
content to accept the common uses. The chief of these (for the moment)
is that of the material and spiritual; without forgetting that they
melt at their borders the one into the other, and that we meet with
corresponding ambiguities, yet I must take them as distinct fields of
human life. In our interesting personal conversation you may remember
that I expressed the opinion that, on the whole, our prayers must not
be for material but for spiritual things. And, speaking on the whole,
sickness is a material thing. In the stories of our Lord’s miracles
it has always struck me that He regarded His miracles--I must use the
word for brevity--apologetically. The disciples were not to tell any
man of them; or again, a miracle was performed under a compelling sense
of the overwhelming faith of the pleader, which was the main thing.
Faith, prayer, were to be for the needs of the soul, not of the body.
For instance, the father seeing his child in diphtheria would please
God better--so the experience of His world tells us--by spending his
first hour in seeking the physician with his antidote rather than
in prayer for a divine intervention. And when time came for prayer
he would pray not for a suspension of natural law but for unity of
his own will with that of the Father, and for the child’s spiritual
welfare. Into the origin of evil do not fear that I shall enter; it
is one of the antinomies which I have said that we must avoid, at any
rate at present: I can only now say that disease is a material effect
to be combated by material means, and not by religious processions or
intercessions.
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.
So much for the ‘miracles’; which owe nothing to any sacerdotal magic,
and to the physician are part of a familiar experience, and of a
familiar interpretation. But giving up the hysterical cases--which,
by the way, is to give up a good deal--and admitting that disease is
in the body a material thing, and one not properly matter for the
pleading of prayer, except in the spiritual sense of submission to
the Divine order, between these positions is there a sphere in which
spiritual influences--whether by a clergyman or a Biblewoman or a
gentle friend--may so infuse peace and confidence into a sick man as
to promote even in the body a renewal, a conversion, or an economy of
energy which should make for recovery? Certainly; and here, I think, is
the restricted, if still important, sphere of religion as medical.
To consider this aspect of the matter we must go back for a moment to
certain principles. From the letters of Teresa--that noble saint--we
may learn much of the greatest value to us in the present inquiry.
We may learn from her to distrust the ‘ecstasies and melancholies’
which--as she said--were ‘the perils of conventual life’; she roundly
denounced all that ‘letting one’s self go, outside the control of
reason,’ which has its origin in ‘sick brains.’
‘If I were with you,’ she wrote to a certain Prioress, ‘you would
not have so many extraordinary experiences.’ Now Teresa not only
apprehended, but thoroughly understood, that the highest spiritual life
depends upon the best bodily health. She tells us that she supported
her own vigils with plenty of meat (_viande_) and sleep. High and
holy thought demands the greatest effort of the healthiest body, of
the brain most finely balanced and best nourished. The piety of the
sick-bed is at best a passive piety, which on recovery is pushed aside
again by the custom of the world; but herein it is that in sickness
the soul flags and droops upon itself, and that the support of other
sympathy is more precious. The sympathy we all depend on in health we
need most when enfeebled by ailment. There is no delusion more terrible
than that which lets a man run up a score of sins and negligences to be
repented of under the discouragement of a sick-bed. In this melancholy,
this debility, this disappointment, perhaps this remorse, energy is
wasted which is sorely required for the conflict with disease. And even
the man of religious life likewise--if in less degree, as one who has
accumulated more inward light--is also disheartened to perceive that
the fountains of spiritual contemplation are then less copious, and
aspiration a wearier effort. He too needs help, if not to make, yet
to reinforce, the happier conversations of his fuller life. In health
the mind in solitude droops and wastes, and the sick-bed is a kind
of solitude; the thousand and one stimulating impressions of common
life cease, the impressions wane which should keep the mind and soul
awake, and fill the wells of energy. On the sick-bed, therefore,
short times of encouragement and sympathy, periods not long enough to
exhaust the scanty stores of energy, are precious; and if the physician
be jealous--as it has been said--of the priest, it is lest he should
expend these stores more in priestly functions than in ‘angels’ visits’
of love and hope which would unite and reinforce the vacillating and
fading forces. Thus also prayer at the bedside and the short communions
should be of love and hope, not particular requests for material relief
or cure. The kindly physician himself may be a vehicle of much of this
encouragement; but--as I said to you before--he should avoid even the
semblance of attending to anything beside his own business of material
aid and general human sympathy. The most pious patient, openly or
inwardly, resents the divided mind. The instinct of self-preservation
is not lost even in those nearest to God.
So when all is said and done on this subject I fear that matters for
me remain much where they were before; but they may lead to a more
intimate understanding of the several parts of the spiritual and
the medical visitors, and to a completer sympathy between them. If
still it be urged that an imposing ceremony may, by a measure of the
‘suggestion’ so effective in the many-coloured hysteria, come to our
aid in more noxious maladies, if no more than on the fringe of them, I
should repeat that the advantage would be so indefinite, so relatively
small, and so well to be attained by ordinary spiritual visitation, as
not to be worth the peril of the moral perversion which hangs only too
closely around these good intentions, the peril of imposing upon, even
of bamboozling, the patient. We must remember the saying of Lavoisier,
‘Medicine came into the world with a twin brother, called charlatanism.’
Clifford Allbutt.
* * * * *
Extract from Sir Clifford Allbutt’s paper in the _British Medical
Journal_, June 18, 1910:
‘Spiritual gifts may or may not consist in the insertion of a new
entity, they certainly do consist in a reanimation and remodelling of
thinking matter in the uppermost strands of the brain, and probably of
some other, perhaps even of all the other, molecular activities of the
body. Probably no limb, no viscus is so far a vessel of dishonour as
to lie wholly outside the renewals of the spirit; and to an infinite
intelligence every accession of spiritual life would be apparent
in a new harmony (συγγυμνασία) of each and all of the metabolic
streams and confluences of the body. On this conviction it is that
the hopes and methods of faith healing depend. Conversely, every man
who watches his own life must know this, as in time of weariness
or pain he grieves over the drooping of his soul, that the highest
spiritual life depends on the highest bodily health; but this health
means, not health only of the belly, not only health of the heart
and common brain, but also of the rarest and most exquisite textures
of the cerebral web. If in a rude health of the grosser body these
subtlest parts have not been exercised and cherished, the total harmony
is diminished; highly efficient as, on lower planes, the particular
body may be, it is defective in comprehensions, it is an inconsummate
body. To this “materialism” of the body, even on its most spiritual
planes of structure, we must not close our eyes lest in our search
beyond knowledge we walk contrary to knowledge. “To pray well,” said
the noble Teresa, “one must eat well and sleep well.” If into the last
analysis the Pauline division between the carnal and the spiritual
cannot be carried, if under the relations of other times and of other
ideas we have to re-interpret it, yet still in its broader contrasts
it points out a plain way of life and conduct--one so plain that the
perplexities of the middle terms may be left to the casuist.
‘It must be granted then, in respect of faith healing, that spiritual
influences, divine directly, or indirectly through human mediation,
may to some unknown power radiate from these highest currents downward
through the more and more “material” planes, arousing them less and
less as they have become more and more statical in order.
‘Once more; it is said that in his “subliminal self” man possesses a
substance peculiarly divine, or a substance or means through which
we may reach divine communion, or through which especially divine
purposes may be fulfilled in us. It is true that we do not know even
approximately the content of the individual man, the materials racially
and personally acquired, the products of past experience, racial and
personal, built sensibly and insensibly into his personality. May we
not each of us be compared with a ship which began its voyage with no
inconsiderable rudimentary equipment, then, calling at many a port, has
gathered many kinds of stores and treasure? Of some of these stores, of
some variety of them, the supercargo has a recollection, especially of
those in frequent use; but, for the most part, the bills of lading had
been lost. Unlike a cargo, however, these contents are not a passive
burden, but a system of coefficients; some on planes which we commonly
call material, some on spiritual planes, some working on the surface,
some working stealthily within; so that much tact and insight are
necessary to unveil and to re-animate those agencies in whose abeyance
disorder or ineffectualness may happen to consist. And the influences
which are to effect these revivals must be akin in nature to these
kinds respectively; some must be solidly material--such as splints
or drugs--some must be religious, moral, and even intellectual, yet
inspired by emotion, by appeal to hope and joy; and their instruments
must be devotion, sympathy, gladness, reasonable persuasion, and even
surprise.’
RELIGION AND MEDICINE IN THE HOSPITAL
No one who has been connected with one of our big general hospitals
can doubt for a moment the advisability of the collaboration of the
physician and the clergyman, each helping the patient from his own
standpoint. It must not be imagined that I advocate any usurping of
the duties of one by the other, but in the cure of certain types of
disease, and certainly in the cure of diseases that are primarily
diseases of mind or character, the doctor should welcome the minister
of religion as a valuable ally. In fact none can doubt that the
minister of religion can bring a power to bear on the mind of a
patient, which the doctor cannot.
Whatever his own personal belief may be, the medical man can of course
only view religion from a philosophic or ethical stand-point. It is
difficult for him to concern himself with dogma. The clergyman can
help by administering suggestions of hope and encouragement. These
suggestions can and do often come from other sources with equal
results, but I think by virtue of his office the clergyman is specially
qualified for the work.
There can be no doubt that cures of certain kinds of diseases have
been effected by Christian Science and kindred faith-healing cults,
all of which cures come under the head of healing by suggestion. I do
not think that healing disease by suggestion is specially a Christian
work, it can be achieved in many ways. But I think the average medical
man likely to be more willing to seek the aid of a duly accredited
minister of religion than a so-called ‘Spiritual Healer’ who is subject
to no authority. But above and beyond all this I think the quieting
and encouraging influences of religion are of the greatest value in all
illness, and I believe a greater use might be made of such power.
Sydney Holland.
THE SURGEON, THE CLERGYMAN, AND THE PATIENT
Possibly the gravest shock that a human being may receive, so far as
it concerns himself or herself, is to be told that fatal disease is
present in the system. So great may be the actual shock that many a
medical practitioner shrinks from inflicting it, and purposely avoids
direct allusion to the certainty of dissolution. Whether this is
justifiable or no, depends very largely upon the susceptibilities of
the patient and the tact of the doctor. But the word ‘operation’ is, by
some, almost as much dreaded as the word ‘death’; in fact even more,
as it always implies to the lay mind the infliction of hours of pain,
and days of discomfort, though this is far from being the truth in most
instances.
‘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.
And still as the growth increases there is the lurking certainty ever
protruding itself that after all the surgeon was right, and the days
are slipping by. Would that friends could be true and friends indeed,
and not in ignorance hinder these circumstances, not mere blind leaders
of the blind.
It is here if anywhere the enlightened clergyman and the surgeon may
join hands for the good of spirit and body. And then when a decision
has been arrived at calmly and deliberately, and the time of the
operation has been fixed, there is still work for both the minister
and the surgeon to do. A quiet talk and prayer the evening before the
ordeal, how it has often soothed the trembling soul, and invoked a
night of rest and refreshment, enabling the patient to meet the trials
of the morning calm, because mentally and physically there has been
repose.
And the surgeon with his cheering word, and the anæsthetist with his
quiet reassuring manner and conversation, both tend to allay any fresh
alarm at that which is perhaps the most trying moment of all--the
placing oneself unreservedly in the hands of the operator.
Surely, surely here is a period when the efforts of the spiritual are
to crown the success of the material.
And then, observe how the quiet and confidence, engendered by the
combined efforts of pastor and doctor, continue during convalescence,
causing that period to be shortened in many a case.
In a hundred different ways members of the two professions may work
hand in hand, but each should be able to mutually esteem the other and
give to each his proper place and function. They ought never to despise
one another, because they ought never to encroach on one another’s
province.
Till the clergyman recognises that it is his duty to understand
something of elementary physiology, if he is going to be a benefactor
to spirit and body, and the medical practitioner is willing to admit
that there are spiritual forces which can be brought to help the
perfection of his work, so long is it the opinion of the writer that
the sufferer who looks to both of them for aid will fail to receive
his full due of assistance. May the time soon come when the rising
generation of all classes may be so taught at school, and in church,
that they will come to understand something of the composition and need
of the tripartite nature of man, and may the day speedily dawn when the
enlightened clerical and medical professions mutually work for the good
of the whole, spirit, soul and body.
F.R.C.S.
MEDICINE AND RELIGION
BY
CHARLES BUTTAR, M.D.
SOMETIME PRESIDENT OF THE HARVEIAN SOCIETY
MEDICINE AND RELIGION
BY CHARLES BUTTAR, M.D.
Widespread interest has been taken of late in what is called ‘Spiritual
Healing,’ or ‘Healing by Spiritual means’; interest which is manifest
from the popularity of such books as ‘Religion and Medicine,’ and
‘Body and Soul,’ no less than from the thoughtful articles contributed
to this volume by many eminent authorities. Yet it may be observed
that, although some of these contributors belong to the profession of
medicine, it is doubtful if many medical men are acquainted with the
objects and purpose of Spiritual Healing, and probably few of them
regard the movement seriously. It is unwise, however, to adopt an
attitude of indifference towards the aspirations of earnest men, so
that it seems well to attempt to define the position of medicine with
regard to such methods of healing, to investigate the cures alleged,
to utter some warning as to possible dangers, and to inquire how far
the results justify the movement, and to what extent it is possible
to adapt the processes of Spiritual Healing to recognised forms of
treatment.
Spiritual Healing has been hailed with enthusiasm by certain members
of the Church of England, under the impression that it constitutes a
resumption of the early powers of Christianity as evidenced in the
miracles of healing ascribed to Christ and His Apostles. A theological
discussion as to the possibility of miracles occurring at the present
day is outside the scope of this article, but it would be well to
define the standpoint from which the medical man approaches all
investigations connected with disease.
The researches of scientists are conducted by the methods of
observation, experiment, and induction; it is the medical man’s duty
to observe symptoms, to experiment as to their cause, to investigate
possible remedies, and to apply these to the relief or cure of disease.
In recent times much has been done towards elucidating the influences
of mind upon body and its diseases; but so far questions connected with
the Spirit have been regarded as outside the scope of medicine.
The minister of religion, on the other hand, has been content hitherto
to leave questions of physical health to be dealt with by the doctor;
he has not interfered to any extent in mental questions, and his chief
concern has been with what is called the ‘Spirit.’ It would seem a
little difficult to define the attributes of Spirit, or to draw a
sharp line of division between spirit and mind; but, however this may
be, spirit has usually been considered as opposed to matter, and no
influence over the material diseases of the body has been ascribed
to it. Whatever views the Church may have held as to the miracles
of healing mentioned in the New Testament, she has to some extent
kept them in the background; and it is possible that they might have
remained there, but for the success obtained by certain irrational
cults that have sprung into being, with the object apparently of
abolishing both parson and doctor. The foundation on which all these
sects are based would seem to be a passage in the Epistle of St. James,
chap. v. verses 14, 15, which reads as follows: ‘Is any sick among you?
let him call for the elders of the Church; and let them pray over him,
anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith
shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.’
Again this is no place to go into theological discussions, such as
whether ‘elder’ can be taken to mean ‘priest,’ the views to be held
on anointing with oil, and so on. But it may be suggested incidentally
that the term ‘elder’ is hardly likely to be accepted by either the
Church or the medical profession as applicable to a person untrained
both in theology and in medicine, whose claim to authority rests on his
own assertion, and whose methods are only too liable to drift into what
is known as ‘quackery.’ Even the Peculiar People, who rely upon the
same text in support of their tenets, retain, I believe, some meaning
of authority in the word ‘elder’; and their position seems logically
sounder than that of the believer in a self-styled ‘Spiritual Healer.’
As regards the procedure of the Spiritual Healer, it would appear to
consist in laying hands on the affected part of the body, at the same
time offering up extempore prayers of a very impassioned character for
the recovery of the sick. The treatment takes place in as impressive
surroundings as possible, and at times a priest is called in to anoint
the patient with oil. It is doubtful to what extent the practitioners
of Spiritual Healing claim what are called ‘special powers’; but it
seems certain that the possession of these powers is sometimes alleged.
Unlike the Christian Scientist, the Spiritual Healer does not despise
medical assistance, though it is probable that at the present time his
treatment is sought chiefly by those to whom medical methods can offer
no further hope of cure.
It has been indicated already that the first great difficulty
experienced by a medical man, in discussing such a treatment as
Spiritual Healing, is the definition of terms. Accustomed to deal with
more or less concrete facts, a doctor has some sort of mental picture
of an infectious disease, as the reaction of the physical body to the
invasion of a germ or its poison; he can see and feel a tumour, and
determine its relation to anatomical structures, though he may not know
as yet the cause of its growth; he has learnt by experience the results
of the removal of new growths.
In the region of the mind also he has investigated many phenomena; he
is able to attribute many insane states to toxic influences; he has
studied to some extent diseases known as ‘functional’--a class that is
becoming numerically less with the advance of knowledge; but he is not
able to grasp to the same extent the meaning of the word ‘Spirit.’ The
medical man recognises in many cases the influence of the temperament
or character of the patient upon the course of the disease, and would
prefer to treat one who takes a hopeful view of the future; just as he
desires quiet cheerful surroundings, and the avoidance of conditions
that tend to irritate or depress. In so far as the ‘Spiritual’ attitude
of the patient conduces to his peace of mind, its assistance would
be welcomed by every practitioner of the healing art. But to regard
this ill-defined attitude as not only influencing the character of the
patient, but also as having a direct effect on all the ailments to
which the body is subject, is a view that can hardly be accepted so
readily. For example, it would seem to be inconceivable that Spirit
could have the slightest influence on a parasitic skin disease such as
ringworm.
This is an instance of a simple ailment due to a local extrinsic cause.
Numerous other conditions might be mentioned, such as congenital
malformation, aneurysms, valvular affections of the heart, and
strangulated hernia in which curative influence of the Spirit is
difficult to imagine. Even if a single well-authenticated miracle in a
case of any of these affections could be produced, we should still be
met by many difficulties; such as the question why a solitary sufferer,
possibly not highly distinguished for his spiritual attributes, should
be selected for the manifestation of this power. And all rational
people would admit that the occurrence of such a miracle in a case
of strangulated hernia would not justify other patients in postponing
operation in the hope of a repetition of this bloodless cure.
Thus there are limitations to the field of operation of Spiritual
Healing.
In view, however, of the hopes raised amongst many good Christians
that the Church may take part once more in healing the sick, everyone
would wish to avoid offending the susceptibilities of enthusiastic
and religious people. Still it is by members of the Church that the
question of Spiritual Healing has been brought forward, so that
it should be for the Church to define her meaning and wishes. In
the nature of things it seems impossible to define ‘Spirit’; and,
perhaps, it would be wiser not to attempt the impossible, nor to
endeavour to yoke spiritual forces to purely material conditions such
as bodily diseases. But if certain cases are produced as cures by
spiritual means, and if the co-operation of the medical profession
is desired in investigating such cures, the Church must be prepared
to accept scientific methods of inquiry, methods which do not permit
of assumptions except as tentative explanations, to be given up when
they fail to explain phenomena, or when they are replaced by simpler
explanations.
If it should appear that the results of Spiritual Healing are
attributable to ordinary activities of the human mind, and that no
difference exists between cures by this means and those resulting from
ordinary mental influences of the nature of ‘suggestion,’ then the
Church must be prepared to abandon all miraculous explanations in these
cases. From the medical point of view the main thing to be insisted
upon is that all alleged cures must be submitted to the ordinary
examination by observation, experiment, and induction.
At the present time the whole question of Spiritual Healing is in so
nebulous a condition that it is not easy to obtain suitable cases
for investigation. Much has been said and written on the matter;
comparisons have been made with the cures said to be effected at
Lourdes; even the Venerable Bede has been quoted as an authority on
medicine. But when a request is presented for the production of actual
cases for investigation by trained medical men, it is found that the
sources of supply are few and very limited.
An examination of some of these cases appears to reveal the fact that
so far no actual cure of any definite gross organic disease can be
recorded. It must be remembered that to avoid any loophole for error
the requirements of a really scientific investigation are somewhat
severe. In the first place the diagnosis of the disease must be
absolutely certain. This frequently necessitates microscopical or
bacteriological examination. A medical man is not always infallible in
his opinion of cases; and it may happen that a condition that has been
thought to be cancer turns out to be merely a comparatively harmless
inflammatory thickening. Such a condition might have recovered by
natural processes without any treatment; to attribute such recovery to
any particular treatment that the patient might be undergoing at the
time would be rash; to use such a case as an advertisement for that
treatment would be dishonest.
In the second place, a fair comparison must be made between the results
obtained by the method under investigation, and by other means of
treatment. Warts may disappear rapidly under many forms of treatment,
or with no treatment at all. To attribute the disappearance of warts to
Spiritual Healing would be very unsafe argument.
Thirdly, a careful distinction must be drawn between the cure of a
disease and the relief of subjective symptoms.
It is in this matter of subjective symptoms that Spiritual Healing
appears to have obtained the greater part of whatever success it can
boast. There is some evidence that under this treatment pain may be
relieved, and there is little doubt that patients attain a calmer,
happier and more confident frame of mind, however hopeless their
disease may be. Their outlook on life is improved, their thoughts are
directed into other channels, and the pain is forgotten, or hindered
from rising into consciousness.
Yet there are certain dangers connected with the process, to which
attention should be called. It is well to remember that, in cases such
as incurable cancer, false hopes are being raised, and the patient
is deluded into a vain belief that he will recover. How far this is
justifiable is a matter for philosophical discussion; moreover it
is true that most doctors allow their patients to delude themselves
with the same vain hopes. Still, it might be better that ministers of
religion should strive for the spiritual welfare of their charges,
rather than help directly to maintain these delusions as to physical
conditions.
More important still is the possibility that treatment, that might be
effective in the early stage of a disease, may be postponed until too
late, in order that a trial may be given to Spiritual Healing. It is
all very well to say that ordinary medical means are recognised and
that the follies of the Peculiar People and of the Christian Scientist
will be avoided; but it must be remembered that a literal reading of
the text of St. James undoubtedly may suggest to a deeply religious
person that medical methods are of minor importance. ‘The Prayer of
Faith shall save the Sick’: is it not possible that the sufferer may
possess a grain of that faith that will remove mountains? And in
the end that small focus of malignant disease, that might have been
eradicated by the surgeon’s knife, has extended and disseminated itself
until all hope of cure is gone. And such results are more likely to
follow while this treatment remains in the hands of untrained laymen.
There is great danger that an earnest person, with limited knowledge
both of theology and of medicine, may come to regard himself as
superior to theologian and physician, owing to the fervour of his
faith, combined possibly with a belief that he is endowed with special
powers. It is on practical points such as these that the medical man
is entitled to expect an expression of the views of the Church; and in
this connexion it is permissible to hope that in the examination of
‘special powers’ the authorities of the Church will be content to be
sceptics, in the true sense of the word, until irrefutable proofs of
the possession of these powers are produced.
In attempting to inquire how far the results obtained by Spiritual
Healing justify the movement, the medical man is met by the difficulty
that exists in obtaining evidence. It is true that there is a Society
whose objects are stated thus:
1. For the cultivation, through spiritual means, of both personal and
corporate health.
2. For the restoration to the Church of the Scriptural practice of
Divine Healing.
3. For the study of the influence of Spiritual upon Physical well-being.
Investigation of the literature published by this Society does not
throw much light on the methods by which these objects are pursued.
A pamphlet entitled ‘The Principles of Spiritual Healing’ seemed to
arouse hopes of elucidating the problem. Yet the author says, ‘I do
not know how “life” is affected by spiritual means, I observe that it
is so.’ There is no attempt to define spiritual means. Again, it is
asserted that no one will ever find, at meetings of the Society, a
parade of successful cases. Is the statement, then, of members of the
Society to be the only evidence vouchsafed to inquirers? And how far is
the second object of the Society to be carried? It must be remembered
that the Scriptural practice of Divine Healing was unassociated with
the ordinary medical treatment. In ‘The Principles of Spiritual
Healing’ it is asserted that miracles of healing did not cease; they
have only become less frequent because faith is less intense. The
second object of the Society is to restore to the Church this practice
of healing; and it is difficult to see how the dangers suggested
earlier in this article are to be avoided.
The fact of the matter is, that it is useless to attempt to adapt
the processes of Spiritual Healing to recognised forms of treatment,
until the exponents of the method cease to soar on the wings of the
imagination, and descend instead to the more prosaic levels of reason.
Nevertheless, there is no doubt that theologians equally earnest, but
far more rational than the founder of the Society to which reference
has been made, are anxious that something should be done by the Church
to assist in the work of restoring the sick to health. These men do
not aspire to work the miracles of Christ and the Apostles by laying
on hands and anointing with oil, but they wish to retain for the
Church some portion of the command ‘Preach the Gospel; heal the sick.’
This wish is entitled to respectful consideration by the medical
profession, and most certainly will receive it from broad-minded
medical men. But inasmuch as the trained physician must be paramount
in his own province of mental and bodily disease, it is the duty of
the minister of religion to recognise that he is subservient in purely
physical matters of health. By all means let him visit those of his own
faith who are sick. Let his object be to inspire these patients with
hope, directing the sufferer’s thoughts away from his disease to higher
things. The laying on of hands and the anointing with oil may well be
dangerous, unless used in a purely symbolic sense; for in the minds of
the more ignorant such proceedings tend to occupy the same position as
the treatment for King’s Evil in former times; and admirable though
the spirit of reverence may be, it is not good to attribute miraculous
powers to the object revered.
Therefore, let the clergyman be content, for the present, to leave
the untrained practice of methods of suggestion to quacks; and
investigation of so-called cures to the medical profession. At the same
time, let the medical man avail himself of the services of the minister
of religion in cases in which exhortation is likely to be of use; for
in the field of functional nervous conditions, and slight mental
disturbances, the help of a priest of forceful character, reasonably
controlled, may be of great service.
In concluding this article a summary of the suggestions offered for
consideration may be made:
(1) The main function of the minister of religion should be concerned
with what is called the spiritual side of man, and not with purely
material conditions, such as disease.
(2) If ministers regard the Scriptures as imposing upon them duties
in healing the sick, they should be content to be subservient to
the physician in material conditions that are not included in their
training.
(3) In dealing with phenomena as specific as diseases, the Church
must be prepared to accept scientific explanations. It is useless to
complain of the materialism of doctors in connexion with material
physical disorders.
(4) It is not unlikely that the effects of spiritual healing will prove
to be merely results of a form of suggestion.
(5) Results that can be described as curative will be found, probably,
only in what are known as functional and neurotic conditions.
(6) It is most unwise to countenance untrained laymen in carrying on
spiritual healing in the name of the Church; for in the end the Church
may find herself dragged at the heels of quackery.
(7) While much can be done by ministers of religion in encouraging
sufferers from disease, or in distracting the attention of
neurasthenics, and while such assistance should be welcomed by medical
men, yet the Church should beware of attempting to attract believers
by means of thaumaturgic displays of healing, which are open to
explanation in other ways. The Church should not enter into competition
with bone-setters, osteopaths, physical culture quacks, and other
undesirable persons.
(8) Opinion on so-called ‘special powers’ should be suspended until
alleged instances of their existence have been thoroughly investigated
by competent trained experts.
THE PATIENT
BY
STEPHEN PAGET, F.R.C.S.
THE PATIENT
BY STEPHEN PAGET, F.R.C.S.
The Bishop of Birmingham wrote to me, last year, the following letter.
He gave me leave to publish it in the second edition of a book of mine
about Christian Science: and he gives me leave to publish it again here:
‘... I should wish to make a little more of your admissions as to
Mental Therapeutics. Thus--If, as you admit, there are so many
functional disorders; and they are curable by mental influences; and
religion is a great mental influence; and this influence (“Quietism”)
is much needed in such and other cases--I should demand of the Church
that it should recognise, far more explicitly, this field of legitimate
curative power, and control it, and claim it by showing the power to
use it. The neglect of this sphere of influence by the Church plays
into the hands of Christian Science. (All this could be associated with
the revival of unction.)
‘Also, I think the medical profession likes--in public--to ignore all
this, and thus in its turn plays into the hands of pseudo-theology.
My criticism is that I want your “admissions” made the basis of a more
positive claim both on the Church and on the medical profession.
‘My own experience in the case of well-to-do people when sick or
dying is that the medical profession is very much inclined to exclude
religion in any form from sick beds till it cannot be of any use.
I do most seriously want to reform (1) the Church, (2) the medical
profession, in the light of what you admit.’
This wise letter says all, to my thinking, that need be said as to
the duty of the doctor towards the cleric, and the duty of the cleric
towards the doctor. It says not a word about the signs and wonders
alleged by the Society of Emmanuel in London: and I hope that Dr. Gore,
by his silence, condemns them, as not worthy of credence. I hope, also,
and am sure, that in a few years we shall hear less about that Society.
Meanwhile, I should like to say something about one aspect of this
matter of ‘spiritual healing,’ which has not received so much attention
as it deserves. We have heard all about the cleric, all about the
doctor: and we are in danger, I think, of forgetting the patient. We
have been tempted to believe that the patient, somehow, belongs to the
cleric and the doctor. That we may clear our minds of this mistake,
let us put ourselves in the patient’s place. Most of us, I suppose,
know that place: I have been there half a dozen times. It is the
centre of a great planetary system of kind people. Home love, and the
affection of my friends, and the pleasant goodwill of the servants, and
the wisdom and the gentleness of doctors and of nurses, and all prayers
for my recovery, wheeled round me, each in its appointed course. There
I lay, and was watched, like a big baby: and these activities of the
spiritual life encircled me, day and night, till I got better. The
point is, that it all came naturally to everybody. It was the habit
of the home, it was our usual way of doing things. My friends did not
suddenly begin to care for me: the doctors and the nurses did not
suddenly begin to be gentle: the maids were not stung by the splendour
of a sudden thought for my comfort: the use of prayer on my behalf was
nothing new. Everybody was kind to me, because everybody in the house
always is kind to me. They made me comfortable, and one prayed for me,
because they are always making me comfortable, and one daily prays for
me. All of us, except myself, were doing what we always do: and I was
being what I always am.
Illness, nine times out of ten, no more changes a man than sleep and
exercise change him. As by a long sleep, or a long day in the open air,
we gain tranquillity, insight, and self-judgment, so, by an illness,
we gain, if we will, a like measure of self-improvement. The same good
thoughts come to us, as we lie idle in a sick-bed, which come to us as
we lie idle, in holiday time, on a hillside. An illness, apart from its
drawbacks, is in reality a sort of holiday, a dull but not unprofitable
vacation, something halfway between a real holiday and what religious
people call a retreat. There is no sudden change in the patient’s
mind and outlook: only, there is more inlook, more self-doubt, more
quietness of vision.
One day, I shall put myself in the patient’s place, and not come out
of it: I shall not get well, but die. On that occasion, the love,
sympathy, goodwill, medical attendance, and prayers, will be the same
as before. They will swing round me once more, each in its proper
sphere, these familiar angels and ministers of grace defending me. But,
as I begin to stop, so they will begin to stop. It will become absurd,
for my friends to call and ask after me; absurd, for the household to
devise plans for my comfort; absurd, for the doctors to try to feel
what is left of my pulse; absurd, for anybody to pray for my recovery.
Spiritual processes are blessed with plenty of common-sense: they leave
off, when it becomes downright foolishness to go on. Let them leave
what remains of me, and start again round another centre.
They who desire, extravagantly, to put ‘spiritual healing’ among the
methods of the Christian ministry, seem to me to be losing sight of
this fact, that common-sense is an essential part of the spiritual
life. Common-sense tells me, that as I was intended to live, so I
am intended to die. I cannot see any reason, human or divine, why I
should live to old age, and die of that. I would rather not: anyhow,
I see no reason why I should. God, who brought me into the world by
my mother’s pain, will some day put me out of the world, by my own
pain. He is in no sense more on the side of life than on the side of
death. I have been looking at the ‘Order for the Visitation of the
Sick’ in the Prayer-book and I am quite sure that nobody now could
write anything half so sensible or so majestical.... _Know this, that
Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them
pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness, and sickness.
Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is
God’s visitation._ And the prayer for a sick child, also, seems to me
a very sensible and beautiful piece of writing. I find, also, a prayer
for a sick person, ‘when there appeareth small hope of recovery.’ I
have heard it read over one at the point of death, when there was no
hope at all of recovery. ‘We know,’ it says, ‘that, if Thou wilt,
Thou canst even yet raise him up.’ I hope that I shall not, when I am
dying, hear this phrase. It rings false, to my thinking: it offends
the natural dignity of a dying man. We doctors are blamed, now and
again, for not telling the truth to patients hopelessly ill: but here
is the Prayer-book, at the last moment, hardly more straightforward.
All the same, this Order for the Visitation of the Sick is admirable;
and I desire to contrast it with the following instance, how Christian
Science treats the dying:
‘Mrs. ---- is a widow, and an old friend of mine. In February 1905,
her only child, a boy of eleven, was in the last stage of a hopeless
illness--mitral valvular heart disease, with rheumatism and dropsy. I
had an opportunity of a few minutes’ talk with the Christian Science
“practitioner”--a sweet, gentle, earnest woman--and asked her if
she really thought she would do any good. “Oh yes,” she replied,
with a smile of confidence; “I have never known a failure.” “But,” I
suggested, “the boy is very seriously ill:” and I explained the nature
of his complaint. Still confidently smiling, the practitioner replied,
“We have had worse cases than this.” I told her the best medical advice
had been taken, and the doctors had all given the boy up. Upon which
the lady remarked, with gentle emphasis, “_God_ has not given him up.”
That of course was conclusive, and I left her to do her best. I went
away at ten o’clock, and then the Scientist seated herself by the
patient, read to him from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s book, and exhorted
him in some such language as this: “You must not think you are ill, my
dear little boy. You are _not_ ill: you _can’t_ be ill. God would not
make you ill. He made all things good, but not illness”--and so on,
and so on. The boy, I am told, heard her patiently but wearily, and at
one-thirty he died. Then the practitioner gathered up her books and
papers and went away, and that is the end of the story.’
Here we have Christian Science in a favourable light: all the same, it
is not a pleasant picture, these falsehoods told to a dying child. If
it be not true that God ‘makes illness,’ and if it be not true that God
‘gives us up,’ then I attach no meaning at all to that Name.
Let us put ourselves at that point of the case where there appeareth
small hope of recovery. The doctors have given the patient up. God,
in their opinion, has done the same. The cleric will not say that,
not in so many words: _Yet_, he says, _forasmuch as in all appearance
the time of his dissolution draweth near, so fit and prepare him, we
beseech Thee, against the hour of death, that after his departure
hence in peace, and in Thy favour, his soul may be received into Thine
everlasting Kingdom_. The cleric does not pray for the patient’s
recovery. He does not expect anything to happen, save the patient’s
death. He will not point-blank deny the possibility of a miracle: but
he neither asks for anything to happen, nor, so far as I can see, wants
anything to happen: he only cares to be sure that the patient, who is
fast going, shall go the right way.
It is here, on this edge of time between life and death, that the
professional spiritual healer loves to perform. He desires to make
something happen: he will not take it for granted that nothing will
happen.
His position is logical, and may be held in absolute sincerity. Only,
he is bound to tell us what, in his experience, does happen: and he is
bound to tell us of every case of failure, or partial failure. And we
are bound to examine, test, cross-examine, criticise, analyse, watch,
and almost spy upon every scrap of his work; and that in a spirit of
hard and well-nigh brutal indifference to his belief in himself as a
channel of divine intervention. What else does he expect of us? What
else are we here for?
Among a pile of letters and pamphlets on my table is a tract called
‘New Eyes in answer to Prayer.’ It gives the case of Mr. Evison, of
Grimsby. He had something the matter with his eyes. At last, ‘while
walking out with a friend one day, I put my hand in my pocket for
something, and dropped it on the ground: on stooping down to pick it
up, the remaining pieces of my eyes dropped out of their sockets on to
the ground. They were about the size of the kernel of a nut.’ So he
went to a ‘Divine Healing Home,’ where he was anointed with oil in the
name of the Lord. Ten days later, as he was praying in his bedroom, he
felt two warm fingers touch his empty sockets, and they became warm.
Later, at a prayer meeting, his eyes ‘came wide open,’ and he saw
perfectly. Next day he testified to his recovery; and, says the tract,
‘When this testimony was given by Mr. Evison, there were fifty-seven
cases of blindness restored in answer to prayer.’
I feel sure that the writer of this tract thought that he was telling
the truth. And I am no less sure that a great deal of ‘spiritual
healing’ is just as worthless, just as untrue, as these Grimsby
miracles. Till the alleged wonders of spiritual healing, and its
unpublished failures, have been all submitted to keen scrutiny, and to
every severest and most searching test that can be devised in science,
nobody who knows anything about pathology can take much interest in
them. So I come back to the Bishop of Birmingham’s wise eirenicon.
It is a great pity that the work of the cleric and the work of the
doctor should ever clash; for they are ordained (the Prayer-book again)
for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of
the other. Only, if they are to be friends in ministering to the sick
and the dying, they must be friends always. If, in social life, they
do not get on well together, they will not work together well in the
sick-room. If the doctor makes stupid jokes against religion, and the
cleric doses his parishioners with quack medicines; if the doctor is
dull to the wonders of faith, and the cleric is dull to the wonders of
science: if neither has the grace to recognise and honour and openly
praise the good works of the other--how shall they adjust themselves,
in the presence of impending death, who thus waste the opportunities of
daily life?
THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENT
BY
JANE WALKER, M.D.
PHYSICIAN, NEW HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN
THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENT
BY JANE WALKER, M.D.
In considering the subject of Religion and Medicine, we shall be helped
by looking back to the beginnings of things, when people first realised
that illnesses existed, and that certain of them were curable. They
knew nothing of internal anatomy or physiology, nothing of the origin
and treatment of disease, nothing of its infectious, communicable
character. The treatment, or, at any rate, the healing of disease,
must have been by means of what seemed to be mental influences in
those early ages. Why, our very word ‘Influenza,’ revived within
comparatively recent years, shows how vaguely and imperfectly was
understood a disease which now we recognise as having a definite train
of symptoms, but of which we still know so little that we speak of it
merely as an _influence_.
The idea of mental influence in disease was first scientifically
formulated about twenty-five years ago, and was provided with one of
those queer names which we now use more or less glibly, with a sort
of comforting feeling that we understand the subject, when we have
successfully mastered the spelling and pronunciation--the scientific
name _psychotherapeutics_, or, in plain English, _mind cure_. These
investigations were undertaken in France, to start with, at Nancy
University, by Liébault, who published, in 1866, ‘Treatment by
Suggestion,’ and by Bernheim, and simultaneously in Paris by Charcot,
and they were primarily to observe sundry methods of treatment used
at that time in an unscientific manner, such as animal magnetism,
mesmerism, hypnotism, &c. Liébault’s book, which was taken little
notice of at the time, gave a full description of the methods he
pursued, which more or less coincide with those followed by doctors
who practise Treatment by Suggestion and Hypnotism at the present day.
He lived a retired life, and practised entirely amongst the poor, who
were devoted to him, but, at the same time, regarded him as an amiable
enthusiast. Liébault finally retired on a very small competency, not
acquired from his practice, which was altogether unremunerative.
As a result of this gathering up of all these so-called occult methods
of treatment into the more or less exact science of Psychotherapeutics,
have come into prominence many cults--or sects, shall we call
them?--such as Mental Healing, Faith Cures, Peculiar People,
Metaphysical Healing, Christian Science, each of which is overlaid with
doctrines of a more or less dubious kind. The growth of these various
bodies of late years has been extraordinarily rapid: to mention two of
them only, Christian Science and New Thought are now enthusiastically
practised and believed in by many thousands of people, both here and
in America, and hundreds of churches have been provided and erected in
their names.
It must not be lost sight of that Christian Science, as well as New
Thought, which has been described by Mr. Dresser, one of its chief
exponents, as being ‘a common-sense, rational phase of the Mental
Healing Doctrine,’ ‘are dealing with genuine _facts_ in the sphere of
Mental Therapeutics’; but these facts are entirely independent of the
theories by which either school attempts to explain them.
The spread of Christian Science was viewed with considerable alarm by
many influential members and dignitaries of our own Church, and this
feeling was brought to a head at the Pan-Anglican Congress in 1908,
when a large meeting on the subject was held at the Albert Hall, which
is fully reported in the handbook of the Pan-Anglican Congress.
Following on the Pan-Anglican Congress meeting came the Pronouncement
of the Bishops assembled in Conference at Lambeth, in July 1908. The
report of this Conference is published by the S.P.C.K. as a pamphlet.
On November 16, 1908, an important conference on Spiritual Healing
was held at Sion College, which was presided over by Prebendary
Pennefather, who said that the Church had too long neglected that
part of her teaching and ministry. Mr. Hickson gave an account of the
Society of Emmanuel, and stated that they desired to revive in the
Church the use of the gift of healing committed to her by our Lord.
The Rev. Francis Boyd explained the objects and work of the Guild of
Health. They held that bodily healing was not of primary importance,
that sanctification might indeed be gained through sickness, but
that a fuller sanctification might be gained by those who sought
to be made whole by a more real and vital union with our Lord. The
Guild of Health, Mr. Boyd proceeded to say, recognised three systems
of healing--physical, mental, and spiritual--though there was not
necessarily any opposition between them. They felt, however, that
Spiritual Healing was the only system which concerned the Church. They
were quite alive to the dangers of over-estimating the value of bodily
health, and only desired to further it so far as it ministered to the
perfection of the whole nature of man. After some further discussion,
a resolution was passed that, ‘In the opinion of this Conference,
the time has come to form a Central Church Council in the diocese of
London, for the consideration of questions connected with Healing by
Spiritual means.’
At the outset, we must take exception to Mr. Boyd’s three systems. I
very much question whether there is more than _one_ system, and I am
convinced that physical and mental are one and the same. And I would
go so far as to say, that the disastrous mistakes that have been made
in the past, and which are still in operation to-day in the treatment
of one large section of sick people, viz. the insane, largely owe
their origin to this arbitrary division. And, by a curious irony, the
branch of medical science where there is the most marked predominance
of materialism is this very department of mental diseases. This is all
the more curious when we reflect, what occult influences have been,
in all ages, supposed to work upon the insane. The obnoxious word
‘lunatic’ is a proof of this. The moon was by some supposed to have a
deleterious effect on the intellect; insane persons were spoken of as
‘moonstruck’; the periodicity of the mental attacks was also supposed
to have some relation to the lunar interval. Indeed, the whole subject
of insanity bristles with occult and mysterious theories. The really
hopeful treatment of insanity began when it--a mental disease--was
treated, not by mental, but by physical methods, and the more mental
and physical are taken together as one and the same, the more rational
and productive of good, in the best sense, is our treatment likely to
be. Indeed, the whole indivisibility of the three systems is nowhere so
well shown as in the arbitrary division of Religious Insanity. Surely
if we try to turn the minds of the sufferers from any considerations
of religion, by removing their Bibles, by preventing them from any
religious discussion, or from taking part in any religious ceremonies,
we are helping to keep up the evil. People, as we put it, become
insane on religious matters, not only because they have been dwelling
on the subject unduly, but because it is naturally of the greatest
importance, and absorbs more attention than probably anything else in
the world. Now, as the more purely physical, as distinguished from the
more or less occult methods of regarding the insane, has become the
more enlightened and modern view of the subject, so has the spiritual
method of dealing with it come into prominence. Spiritual ministrations
to the insane may be thought to be useless, or, at any rate, to be
fraught with little practical utility. Comparatively recently a man who
had charge of a country parish was appointed chaplain to Broadmoor,
which is the asylum for insane criminals. A friend, on being told of
the appointment, said to him, ‘Why, whatever will you say to them? You
can only talk to them of their sins.’ ‘Talk to them of their sins!’ he
said; ‘I shall never mention them.[10] I shall talk to them of Hope.’
[10] ‘The Society of the Crown of Our Lord’ was formed for the
purpose of supplying spiritual ministrations to the insane.
I have thought it advisable to dwell rather at length on the question
of the insane, because it really rather fairly represents my point of
view on this subject. Whether you agree with me or not, it is better
that I should state quite fairly and straightly my position, which has
only been reached by honestly striving after truth, and by looking
fully into the subject for the purposes of this paper. In talking about
Spiritual Healing, we are hampered at the start, because we have only
actual knowledge of physical things, i.e. of things as they appear to
us here. We have to define spiritual things in physical terms, because
they are the only things we know and understand. Time and space do not
exist in the spiritual domain. Take just one word in illustration of my
meaning, the word _Rest_. Our present state of being here has certain
peculiarities. Labour involves rest from labour, and if the limits of
rest and labour are exceeded, the result is ruin to man’s moral and
physical being. Disease is sure to follow the inactive mind or body,
and then comes a time when ‘we cannot do the things we would.’ But
these things do not exist in spiritual language. ‘They rest not day and
night, but cry “Holy, Holy, Holy.”’ When we pray ‘Eternal rest grant
them, O Lord,’ we have no thought of a period of rest as we understand
it, but rest in and with God.
We are far too apt to think that suffering is an evil--it is not
necessarily so; on the contrary it may be a blessing, because it is
often a direct means of advance towards perfection. Far too much
attention is paid at the present day to temporal benefits. ‘Get rid
of poverty, of suffering, and the world will be virtuous and happy,’
but this is not so. The people who starve and brutally ill-use their
children are not the very poorest; they are usually well-to-do in
the world. There is a great deal too much of considering poverty as
a _real_ cause of suffering. Christ’s mission of redemption was not
primarily a mission for the relief of suffering. If He bids us to take
up our cross, He also bids us, as a quite essential corollary, to
follow Him. Indeed, taking up our cross is useless, if we do not follow
Him. Pain, far from being shunned, should be welcomed and embraced,
because it brings us nearer to the sufferings of our Blessed Lord. It
is not, of course, mere pain in itself that lifts and cleanses: it is
pain rightly and courageously borne, from whatever motive. If this
be true, the modern revolt against all suffering--and here I quote
from the late Miss Caroline Stephens’s article on ‘Pain,’ published
in the _Hibbert Journal_ for October 1908--‘is obviously suicidal. To
extinguish all suffering, were that possible, would be to deprive the
world of a leverage as all-pervading and effectual towards spiritual
elevation and purification, as is gravitation towards stability.’
Pain and evil are not interchangeable terms, but are quite different.
Evil cannot be innocent, though pain can be, and often is. When the
disciples said, ‘What hath this man or his parents done that he should
be born blind?’ they formulated the usually accepted idea at that time,
and an idea, moreover, that dies very hard. The whole treatment of
disease in the Middle Ages was based on it.
If we quite briefly consider our Lord’s miracles, they were _signs_
of His Divine mission, not proofs, and in performing them, He felt
limitations; for we are definitely told that in Capernaum ‘He did no
more mighty works, because of their unbelief.’ These signs were sudden
manifestations of His power, and as such they are preferably called
Divine Healing. They showed the very highest degree of spiritual power,
but there was nothing really new. Christ was the perfect manifestation
of eternal things, and eternal things are obviously never new. Perhaps
the fact that our Lord thought it worth while to show his power in
bodily healing was intended to teach us that to keep our bodies in
health is an important religious duty, and more than that, that all
hygienic social work undertaken is an important part of the duties
of religion. Both nursing and doctoring bring us very near to part
of the work of Christ, for He went about doing good to the sick, and
He symbolised this, not only by His healing words, but by the simple
medicines and nursing of the Good Samaritan. But just as illness is
by no means caused by evil or ill-doing, so it is equally clear that
goodness does not of necessity bring health. The question of bodily
health has no connexion with spiritual conceptions at all. If it were
so, the persons who are the strongest physically would be the most
spiritual; but we know, of course, that this is not so. Take St.
Catherine of Siena, one of the greatest of saints, statesmen, and
scholars that the world has ever known. She healed others, but she
died herself of a lingering, painful disease, at the early age of
thirty-three. Also St. Paul, who prayed the Lord thrice that the thorn
in the flesh which tormented him might be removed. And the Lord’s reply
has been a help and comfort, and a lesson to countless thousands ever
since. ‘My grace is sufficient for thee, for My power is made perfect
through weakness.’ And what we so very often see now, persons bereft
of all that makes life dear, in suffering of mind or body maybe, yet
rise above their weakness, and carry through such reforms and such
noble acts as they never could have done had they been allowed to
remain in bodily health and comfortable and happy surroundings. Indeed,
St. Paul’s affliction was the means of his converting the Galatians,
for his illness compelled him to stop with them for a time, and in
writing to the Corinthians from them, he could truly say, ‘Most gladly,
therefore, will I rather glory in my weaknesses that the strength of
Christ may cover me.’ To repeat, it is our duty, as far as can be,
to keep our bodies in health, though we can most of us conceive of
circumstances when to lose our life may be indeed to save it.
In a sermon preached for the ‘Guild of Poor Brave Things,’ the present
Bishop of London, who is the president of the Guild, said: ‘What made
more impression on me as an undergraduate at Oxford than all the
sermons I ever heard in chapel was a young don, insisting, at the
risk of his life, on ministering to an undergraduate dying of a most
infectious disease.’
After all, St. Paul’s life, as narrated by himself, can hardly have
been considered as hygienic. ‘Of the Jews five times received I forty
stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned,
thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day have I been in the deep;
in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in
perils of my own countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, in perils in
the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils
amongst false brethren; in labour and travail, in watchings often, in
hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Besides
those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me
daily, anxiety for all the churches.’ In comparison with this, the
‘Don’t-worry Gospel’ of the Christian Scientists seems utterly beside
the mark. Health is undoubtedly good, but it must sometimes be cast
away in the service of others.
Of course there is a philosophical difficulty in the whole position
of the relation of religion to medicine. In a manner they are, as it
were, at loggerheads from the outset. The Church is bound to teach
that it matters not how long or how short a man’s life is, if it is
rightly spent, whereas the doctor’s point of view must be to keep the
man alive at any price. And although we may feel that, under certain
circumstances, the medical attitude might be modified, it is the only
safe one in the present state of our knowledge. Euthanasia seems,
on the surface, a most humane and comforting suggestion, but it is
allowing us finite beings to take into our own hands things which are
beyond our comprehension. We all know of instances where it must
have been thought that death would be preferable to life; but apart
from the presumptuous thought of mere human beings, look how often
the maimed bodily frame ‘rises on stepping stones of its dead self to
higher things.’ A man struck with blindness, for example, may be living
a full and perfect and whole life, in spite of his maimed condition,
because he puts out all his powers and lives at the top of his bent.
Such a man is in the highest state a healthy being. The unwhole man is
one who is always in terror of his life, and who does not accept with
faith and cheerfulness, and in a life of prayer, the ills that are
laid upon him by a wise and Divine Providence. It is true that there
are more things wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. Yes, but
even our prayers have necessary limitations arising from our imperfect
knowledge, and when St. James declared that the prayer of faith shall
save the sick, he spoke at a time when scientific investigation was
non-existent, and when people must have been sorely distressed by
their total inability to overcome the diseases from which those around
them were suffering. But for us, whose physical knowledge is so much
more exact, to refuse to accept the remedies which hard and patient
toil has discovered, under God’s help and guidance (there whether
we recognise it or not), is both presumptuous and foolish. Spiritual
Healing--i.e. a quasi-miraculous process--_must_ die a natural death,
even if the agony is prolonged. It is simply pandering to charlatanism,
and by its exaltation of the Health of the Body, is almost pagan in its
effects. It is, moreover, an emphatic expression of individualism at
a time when co-operation in every direction is the natural and right
trend of affairs; for truly never did we feel so strongly as now,
that no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself--as true
of nations as of individuals. It is, therefore, in the highest sense,
reactionary, and a sentimental attempt to put the clock back, which is
doomed to failure. Take one item, which is wrapped up in this idea of
Spiritual Healing, and that is Demoniac Possession. This was an ancient
belief, as is shown by some of the miracles narrated in the Gospels,
and there is an attempt to revive it in the present day, and with that,
a practice of Exorcism as a cure for it. ‘But,’ and here I quote from
‘Religion and Medicine,’ ‘it is a significant fact that as education
spreads, belief in demoniac possession dies out, and the greatest
strongholds of the belief to-day are in non-Christian countries.’
A possible explanation of this is, that in Christian countries,
spiritual forces have been actively at work for many generations, and
that this spiritual activity has weakened the power of the forces
of evil. There is, too, no blinking the question that the behaviour
of insane people, or even of people supposed to be insane, might be
explained on the theory of demoniac possession. For example, how often
one sees people generally good and kind, and even truly religious, go
suddenly into a fury of temper or violence of some kind; or in delirium
we know that quite sweet, innocent people say dreadful things which one
would think they could not even _know_. No doubt to some people the
temporary possession by some evil spirit is a more comfortable theory
than that it is a revelation of the natural man in us, when discipline
and training are in some way relaxed, and that such is our _real_
nature let loose.
The dangers of a belief in, and of practising _consciously_, Spiritual
Healing are great, as far as doctors are concerned. It simply puts
a premium on ignorance and laziness, and is disastrous to exact
knowledge and scientific investigation. Spiritual healers assert that
to dwell on the abnormal and pathological prevents their work on the
normal. But who is to say what is the normal, till abnormalities have
been weighed and considered? No, to people like myself who practise
medicine, it is a dangerous and uncertain weapon to employ. Far be it
from me to say that the spiritual side of medicine should be ignored
altogether. We know that our prayers, rightly offered, are a help to
our patients--we _know_ that the ordained Sacraments of the Church are
a help to them. Moreover, we know very well that there is no royal road
to the treatment of disease. We know well how many cases there are in
our various hospitals and infirmaries, that have baffled all the skill
of diagnosis and treatment that has been vouched to the world up to the
present time. Is it rational to believe that such cases will be healed
by a glance, or a touch, or a word of any merely human person, however
holy, who is manifestly ignorant of any ordinary scientific knowledge?
No, Spiritual Healing as a cult, as a part of the sacramental life of
the Church, will cease to exist, but all that has come out of it will
be quickened and strengthened. We shall feel greater need of prayer
and intercession, and we shall feel more and more the real value of
meditation.
That the medical profession is fully alive to the importance of the
question, in spite of its difficulties, may be inferred from the
following extract from the _British Medical Journal_, November 6, 1909:
‘We welcome the discussion at the Harveian Society, as a sign that the
profession is more fully realising the value of certain potentialities
of healing and relief, which an ingrained materialism passes by on one
side. All around us spiritual or mental healing is going on. It is our
duty, as it is our interest, to study the process scientifically, to
define its limitations both in regard to the conditions to which it
is applicable and to the persons who can successfully apply it, and
to recognise perhaps more fully than before that man is a compound of
body and spirit, both of which have to be taken into account by those
who undertake the treatment of disease. The first step to be taken,
if the profession is not to surrender a large part of its sphere
of usefulness, is that medical practitioners should be trained in
psychology as well as in physiology. In saying this we do not wish to
be understood as pinning our faith entirely to experimental psychology.
A careful study of the works of the great masters of the human heart
is at least as important as the estimate of time reactions and the
accuracy of visual impressions.’ ‘A careful study of the works of the
great masters of the human heart’--this rings true, and makes one
hopeful, in spite of the confusion in terms that exist in regard to
Psychic Healing and Spiritual Healing.
Spiritual Healing may be defined as a change in a person’s point of
view. It may be a question of building up character, or of development
of spiritual attributes. In both cases, it is essentially a matter of
instruction. And the teaching will be effective in proportion as the
teacher is possessed of sincerity and sympathy. I am anxious to be most
emphatic in saying this, because so much misunderstanding has arisen
of late on all sides, owing to misconceptions on this point. Spiritual
Healing can only, in quite a secondary way, be a physical process.
Again, take the case of a man who becomes blind in a way that prohibits
any idea of his ever recovering his sight; he may develop into a
miserable, discontented being on account of his affliction. He comes
under the influence of some teaching, of some person, or of some sudden
religious inspiration. He is healed. Can he see again? No, but he has
risen superior to his blindness. He is a _whole_ man once more. This
is all that he and his lay friends know. He _may_ even enjoy better
physical health than he did while his blindness oppressed him. Or,
again, there may be morbid physical conditions directly or indirectly
attributable to a morbid temperament, sleeplessness due to wrongdoing,
or chronic dyspepsia due to worry. In such cases as these, the doctor
may do little or nothing. The malady is only incidentally a physical
one. Here ‘Spiritual Healing’ in the true sense is the only remedy,
and every liberal-minded medical practitioner would desire it for the
patient.
Practically, as I have repeatedly found from experience, priest and
doctor can combine to the great advantage of the patient. Medical
practitioners need have no fear that, with wise and experienced
priests, they will find their special province interfered with; on the
contrary, their hands will be strengthened, the patients calmed, and
their fortitude increased. It has been my lot many times to find the
irritable patient resentful of her illness, and of God’s dealing with
her, brought to a calm, hopeful, restful frame of mind, and that by the
ministrations and prayers of a wise and tactful priest.
Perhaps St. Catherine of Siena expresses what is meant by all this in
speaking of praying for others. ‘It is toil for him ... to hold him in
the presence of God.’ And it is here that the priest can so greatly
assist us in our labours on behalf of those weak or sick ones who have
been entrusted to our care.
FAITH AND MENTAL INSTABILITY
BY
THEO. B. HYSLOP, M.D.,
SUPERINTENDENT OF BETHLEM HOSPITAL
FAITH AND MENTAL INSTABILITY
BY THEO. B. HYSLOP, M.D.
_The Tendency for Insanity to increase on Account of the Stress of
Life._
That there is a tendency for insanity to increase on account of the
stress of competition and all the complexities of modern civilisation
few will deny. The burden of taxation upon the nerve tissues and the
drain upon their stores of energy must necessarily go on increasing as
the uses for the physical mechanism of the body and limbs diminish and
become replaced by the more complex nervous activities essential to
brain and mental avocations. The influences of rural and urban life,
trades and occupations, &c., as favouring the occurrence of insanity,
have been dealt with in an exhaustive manner in various reports,
treatises, and innumerable papers, and the result has been to apprise
us of the fact that the percentage of individuals who are incapable by
reason of mental perversion or defect from taking active and useful
parts as citizens far exceeds our previous conceptions as to the extent
of the degeneration in our midst.
It is well-nigh impossible to obtain a complete census of the physical
and mental states of the people. Statistics furnish us with so many
fallacies that for present purposes I prefer to omit them, and deal
only with broad issues which seem to have direct bearings upon the
mental health of the community.
It is now an accepted fact that civilisation, with its tendencies
towards the aggregation of individuals into dense communities, favours
the occurrence in those communities of overcrowding, pauperism, crime,
and degeneration. For those designed by habit and heredity to rural
life, migration to cities where the struggle for life is continued
under totally different circumstances is disastrous, and for them
the step from country to town is but one of the commonest of all the
steps towards mental and physical deterioration, the accidents of
civilisation finding in them merely the readiest victims.
The necessity of this migration, as determined by the state of
agriculture, makes it none the less an evil, and it is a symptom in the
evolution of an essentially agricultural race which is fraught with
extreme danger to the maintenance of its nervous and mental stability.
The problem, however, has a different aspect for those who by habit and
heredity are trained for city life, and certain it is that increased
facilities for travelling are tending to decentralise our cities and
thereby render the city dwellers healthier and more fit to cope with
the drain upon their nervous energies. As a physician, it would appear
to the writer that the problem of Sunday observances in town and
country have different bearings on the health and physical fitness of
the people. There is no doubt that periodic decentralisation of town
dwellers is essential to the maintenance of bodily health, and it is
also true that physical exercise and change from mental to physical
functioning and _vice versa_ is essential to all--i.e. if the balance
between the mental and physical powers is to be adequately maintained.
It is, of course, to be understood that to a physician the preservation
of this balance is his first care, and to him is entrusted the function
of aiding in the proper observance of all that is in agreement with
biological and, therefore, natural laws. To him there is a great
difference between ‘observance’ and ‘belief’; and he sees in them
either mutually co-operative or mutually destructive factors for good
or ill respectively.
If religious observances, under determined conditions, are found to
be useful and essential for the sane in mind and body, they are also
likely to be so, under conditions otherwise determined and arranged,
for the insane. Many insane patients are totally incapable of attending
any religious function. Some must be prohibited; others may be
encouraged. As an asylum physician the writer may state that a generic
case of religious excitement or enthusiasm may most advisedly even be
restrained from religious functions until at least the acute symptoms
have subsided. There can be little doubt that no religious officer
would be likely to succeed in accomplishing much for patients without
an accurate knowledge of insanity and the mental experiences of those
whom he seeks to influence. The fact that mental aberration forms a
special study and phase of life increases his difficulties and limits
his possibilities. Where there is apparent failure both inside asylums
and without, such failures may very possibly be attributed to the
deficiencies of the doctrine, the discipline of the religion itself,
the organisations peculiar to it, or the functionaries associated with
it in our day. If the Christian religion is a true philosophy, it is
the duty of all who profess Christianity to assist in the practical
application of its precepts, where such can be judiciously and safely
applied, taking religious things perforce as they find them, and
utilising their own special knowledge to the best possible advantage,
according to the conditions they find.
Is a person with deep religious conviction better equipped to face the
stress of life than an unbeliever? An answer to this question was given
by the writer in a paper read at the annual meeting of the British
Medical Association held at Leicester in 1905. In stating that ‘a true
and philosophical religion raises the mind above a mere incidental
emotionalism’ he used the word ‘religion’ in its literal sense, as
derived from _re_ and _lego_, to gather and consider, as opposed to
_negligens_. He in no way extended its connotation so as to include
demonstrations of incidental emotionalism, superstition, or fanaticism.
Religion and moral obligation he considered to be almost convertible
terms, both equally compatible with intuitionalism, utilitarianism,
or any other ‘ism’ derived from the study of the laws of life and
mind. Moral laws are generally principles of thought and action, which
an intelligent being must apply for himself in the guidance of his
conduct, and the translation of such general principles (expressed
either in general abstract form or in the form of a command) into
particular actions. Conformity with such precepts of morality may with
reason be regarded as a safeguard against the ‘lusts of the flesh.’
Religious enthusiasm in itself cannot justly be termed an evil.
Rather does it embody the most healthy and preservative development
of our social forces. Like many other tendencies of the mind, it is
subject to exaggeration, misapplication, and a predominance of the
emotions over the intellect. The typical cases of religious insanity
directly developable from sectarian and even undenominational religious
enthusiasm, from religious meditations, exercises, devotions, or
superstitions, are by no means so common as they are supposed to be
by the uninitiated observer. The true point lies in this, that very
many mental cases bear a strongly marked religious or at least moral
aspect. The psychology of the subject will show, for example, that
acute depression--a predominant phase of abnormal emotional life--leads
almost necessarily to a religious interpretation. And this is even more
the case with many actual sense perversions. Such, I mean, as have
ever been associated with the ideas of the supernatural.
These are not necessarily caused by religious over-excitement or
enthusiasm. They may assume the appearance of it, because, being
the deepest and most real feelings, desires, and convictions of the
perverted organic life or of the moral reaction which accompanies it,
they cannot well be expressed or described except in strong moral
terms. Over and over again does this appear, and often among those
least likely to be suspected of any religious predisposition. That
these feelings should be clothed according to the prevailing ideas and
creed of the patient is an essential reproduction of the mind. But,
after all, this only relates to the form of their appearance, and there
are many things which lie deeper.
Religious excitement is not infrequently assigned as a cause of
insanity. The writer has stated elsewhere his belief that the
philosophy of the infinite, far from being a source of aberrations
of thought which may be deemed insane, is the ultimate point of our
mental evolution, and that a true and philosophical religion raises the
mind above a mere incidental emotionalism and gives stability. With
no religion and no moral obligation the organism is apt to become a
prey to the lusts of the flesh and their consequences. Gasquet observes
that religion may either produce or tend to hinder unsoundness of mind;
that it may cause certain symptoms of insanity or modify them; and,
lastly, that it may be employed as a means of moral prevention and
treatment. He believes that every form of religion, however widely it
may differ from our standard of the truth, if it enforces the precepts
of morality, is a source of strength to the sound mind that sincerely
accepts it.
Clouston has justly observed that far more depends upon the brain that
goes to church than upon what it may obtain in the church. That is to
say, there must be the predisposition to break down, the religious
influence being often merely an accident. It must also be remembered
that religious over-enthusiasm may be merely a symptom and not a cause.
Much misconception through misquotation has arisen in connexion with
the writer’s views as to the therapeutic value of prayer. Reference
to the context of his views expressed before the Society for the
Study of Childhood will show that reference was made to the _habit_
of prayer in childhood, and its therapeutic value was there urged
more as a preventive than as a curative agent. It was urged that the
mental hygiene of childhood was not to be determined by any special
denominational method.
Such limited methods may result in the fixity of an idea or belief
quite compatible with usefulness in any sphere of activity, but they do
not deal with the broader and deeper question of the preservation of
the mental health of the individual. The exaggerated importance of the
denominational question, which has engendered passive resistance, ought
to give way to the question of mental health and engender a strong
and active resistance to all that tends to narrow or circumscribe the
mental life of the infant. It ought to be our object as teachers and
physicians to fight against all those influences which tend to produce
either religious indifference or intemperance, and to subscribe as
best we may to that form of religious belief, so far as we can find
it practically embodied or effective, which believes in ‘the larger
hope,’ though it condemns unreservedly the demonstrable superstition
and sentimentality which impede its progress and power. As an alienist,
and as one whose whole life has been concerned with the sufferings of
the human mind, the writer believes that of all the hygienic measures
to counteract disturbed sleep, depression of spirits, and all the
miserable sequelæ of a distrait mind, he would undoubtedly give the
first place to the simple _habit_ of prayer. Let the child be taught to
believe in an anthropomorphic God the Father, or in an all-pervading
medium of guidance and control, or in the integrity of a cosmic whole,
with its transmutations, evolutions, and indestructibilities. It
matters little, for they all lead in the same direction. Let there
but be a habit of nightly communion, not as a mendicant or repeater
of words more adapted to the tongue of a sage, but as a humble
individual who submerges or asserts his individuality as an integral
part of a greater whole. Such a habit does more to clean the spirit
and strengthen the soul to overcome mere incidental emotionalism than
any other therapeutic agent known to him. Our schools are as gardens
for the cultivating, judicious pruning and sustaining young life
by gardeners who have, or who ought to have, full knowledge of the
tender plants under their care. Our churches are to the moral welfare
of the community as our schools are to the intellectual. The church
has been aptly termed ‘God’s Garden,’ where the art of living good
lives and the making of character is helped by specially appointed
gardeners. It is needless to say, however, that the light of reason or
sanity, as bestowed upon us by Nature, is the light to which all other
considerations must give way lest we in our turn too soon pass the
borderland of knowing things as they are.
MEDICAL ASPECTS OF MENTAL HEALING
BY
H. G. G. MACKENZIE, M.A., M.B.
MEDICAL ASPECTS OF MENTAL HEALING
BY H. G. G. MACKENZIE, M.A., M.B.
I. _Spiritual Healing in the Light of Modern Medical Science_
I have been asked in this chapter to put together some recent
expressions of opinion by members of my own profession on the subject
of ‘mental’ and ‘spiritual’ healing. No attempt whatever is made to
give an exhaustive summary. It will be sufficient for my purpose if I
can make clear to the non-medical reader--
(1) That there is nothing new in the elaborate and confident
pretensions now being thrust forward by a variety of ‘healers.’
(2) That, so far from scientific medicine ‘standing helpless in the
presence of a new phenomenon,’ she is in possession of a very large
amount of clinical material on which quite definite conclusions have
been formed; and, as always, she is perfectly ready to consider and
investigate any new evidence which might tend to mitigate the force of
such conclusions.
Now, there are obviously two main lines of investigation. We may
consider (1) the _à priori_ reasonableness of the claim that certain
bodily diseases can be cured by ‘mental’ or spiritual processes, or we
may proceed to (2) an _à posteriori_ investigation of cases of alleged
cures. A third method of investigation, that which is, of course,
adopted in _all_ cases of scientific treatment of disease by new
methods, viz. the tabulation of all cases treated, with the diagnosis,
extent of disease, immediate and permanent results, negative as well
as positive, noted in each case, is not usually possible, since no
psychic or spiritual healer whom I have ever met seems to consider such
tabulation at all necessary or even desirable.
In the first place, I submit a somewhat long quotation from an
admirable paper[11] by one of the greatest medical authorities in the
English-speaking world, Professor W. Osler.
[11] _The Treatment of Disease_, by W. Osler, M.D., F.R.S. London:
Henry Frowde. 1909.
‘An influenza-like outbreak of faith-healing seems to have the public
of the American continent in its grip. It is an old story, the oldest
indeed in our history, and one in which we have a strong hereditary
interest, since scientific medicine took its origin in a system
of faith-healing beside which all our modern attempts are feeble
imitations.... Once or twice in each century the serpent entwining
the staff of Æsculapius gets restless, contorts, and in his gambols
swallows his tail, and all at once in full circle back upon us come old
thoughts and old practices which for a time dominate alike doctors and
laity. As a profession we took origin in the cult of Æsculapius ...
whose temples were at once magnificent shrines and hospitals.... Amid
lovely surroundings, chosen for their salubrity, and connected with
famous springs, they were the sanatoriums of the ancient world. The
ritual of the cure is well known, and has been beautifully described
by Pater in Marius the Epicurean.... The popular shrines of the
Catholic Church to-day are in some ways the direct descendants of this
Æsculapian cult, and the cures and votive offerings at Lourdes and Ste.
Anne are in every way analogous to those of Epidaurus.’
Osler goes on to speak with much tenderness of the apparently
ineradicable nature of the credulity evinced not merely by the
multitude but by persons educated widely, if not well, in the matter of
the healing of disease. It is indeed a portentous fact. The slightest
acquaintance with the history of therapeutics, the most casual
examination of the evidence of alleged cures, the faintest stirring of
the reasoning faculty, as the votary asks himself whether the foremost
pathologists who work continuously with the best available material in
an institution devoted to the scientific study of cancer will not be
more likely to arrive at a correct estimate of the probability of cure,
by means other than extirpation, than a quite uninstructed _masseur_
who has taken to ‘spiritual healing,’ these, one would suppose, would
be sufficient to check the growth of credulity which we see in such
evidence around us. Yet the reader will probably feel that Osler is not
going beyond the warrant of easily ascertainable fact when he says:
‘We must acknowledge its potency to-day as effective among the most
civilised people, the people with whom education is the most widely
spread, yet who absorb with wholesale credulity delusions as childish
as any that have enslaved the mind of man.’
Professor Osler’s conclusion is worth quoting:
‘Having recently had to look over a large literature on the subject of
mental healing, ancient and modern, I have tried to put the matter
as succinctly as possible. In all ages and in all climes the prayer
of faith has saved a certain number of the sick. The essentials are,
first, a strong and hopeful belief in a dominant personality, which has
varied naturally in different countries and in different ages: Buddha
in India and in Japan, where there are cults to match every recent
vagary; Æsculapius in ancient Greece and Rome; our Saviour and a host
of Saints in Christian communities; and, lastly, an ordinary doctor
has served the purpose of common necessity very well. Faith is the
most precious asset in our stock-in-trade. Once lost, how long does a
doctor keep his clientele? Secondly, certain accessories--a shrine,
a grotto, a church, a temple, a hospital, a sanatorium [Osler might
have added the admirably devised entourage in such places as ‘Physical
Culture’ Institutes and ‘light cure’ establishments], surroundings
that will impress favourably the imagination of the patient. Thirdly,
suggestion in one of its varied forms--whether the negation of disease
and pain [as among the ‘Eddyites’], the simple trust in Christ of the
Peculiar People, or the sweet reasonableness of the psychotherapeutist.
But there must be the will-to-believe attitude of mind, the mental
receptiveness--in a word, the faith which has made bread-pills
famous in the history of medicine.’ We must, however, recognise the
limitations of ‘mental healing.’ ‘Potent as is the influence of the
mind on the body, and many as are the miracle-like cures which may be
worked, all are in functional disorders, and we know only too well that
nowadays the prayer of faith neither sets a broken thigh nor checks an
epidemic of typhoid fever.’
The following extract is from an article in the _British Medical
Journal_ of March 13, 1909. The article begins by quoting from a paper
by Dr. Allan Hamilton (U.S.A.) to the following effect:
‘In all this agitation, it would almost seem as if the intelligent
physician had never made use of psychotherapy, but that he was a
mechanical giver of drugs and took little or no interest in his
patients. If the new critics of the medical profession, who have been
so active of late, would take the trouble to investigate, they would
often find, among the great and successful men of all times and of
to-day, that the human side is very strongly developed, and that their
patients are studied from every point of view, and treated accordingly.’
‘We would add,’ says the writer of the article in the _British Medical
Journal_, ‘that the intelligent application of the physician’s
knowledge of the influence of the body on the mind is the one
condition of success in the difficult art of dealing with patients
and reinforcing the curative power of Nature or, what comes to the
same thing, enabling sufferers to work out their own deliverance from
the thraldom of functional disease. All really great physicians have
used this force, sometimes, it may be, unconsciously, but often with
deliberate intent. It is the power of influencing the mind of the
patient or, in other words, of exciting confidence in his gift of
healing, that makes what is called “personal magnetism.”’
At this point I may be permitted to offer one or two observations.
(1) To speak quite strictly, it is not a question of _‘à priori’
possibility or impossibility_. As Huxley pointed out, twenty years
ago, few things can be said to be _impossible_ except mathematical
misstatements or manifest contradictions. Thus 2 + 2 cannot possibly
yield any result but 4. A square circle, a raised depression, are, in
the strictest sense of the term, _impossibilities_. But, with regard to
an enormous number of alleged phenomena popularly styled _impossible_,
what is really meant is either that they are not impossible at all, but
only in some high degree improbable, or that we have not sufficient
knowledge to enable us to say whether or not they are impossible. In
any case, before accepting them, we are bound as honest men to demand
evidence which may be thoroughly sifted. The sort of stuff which we
usually get, when we ask for such evidence, will be instanced at a
later stage.
(2) Again, to speak quite strictly, I do not know that anyone would
care to draw a hard-and-fast line between what is ‘functional’ and
what is ‘organic.’ These terms are extremely convenient, but we must
remember that they are only terms. There is an oft-recurring danger,
against which we all require to be continually on our guard, of falling
into the old error of the realists. ‘Animate and inanimate’ (assuming
that the recent claim to have demonstrated in metals a process of
reproduction analogous to those observed in protoplasm is endorsed, as
seems probable), ‘genus and species,’ ‘animal and vegetable,’ these
and many others are eminently useful classifications, and the border
line between each and its opposite varies from comparative precision to
extreme vagueness. But in no case are they absolutely precise in the
sense in which the distinction between an integer and a vulgar fraction
is precise. And in the matter of the terms ‘functional’ and ‘organic’
we must walk very warily indeed. Is epilepsy a functional neurosis or
an organic disease? Analogy suggests organic changes. No such changes
have been constantly demonstrated by _post mortem_ evidence; partly,
of course, because _post mortem_ examinations of cases of death in
the epileptic or epileptiform condition have been extremely rare,
and are not very common in cases where there is a well-authenticated
history of attacks; but partly because our investigations into the
minute anatomy of many morbid conditions are at present barred by the
limitations of microscopic vision. We have no right whatever to assert
dogmatically that there is no organic change in a tissue because we
cannot see it under a magnification of 1000 diameters--though for a
variety of reasons, which all pathologists will recognise, it is not
altogether _probable_ that a magnification of 10,000 diameters would
in such cases demonstrate a constant change. In any case, if we are
told by a spiritual or psychic healer that he cures cases of, let us
say, old-standing chronic nephritis or cirrhosis of the liver by his
own peculiar methods, our reply must be, not that this is impossible
because we are dealing with organic disease, but rather that--
(1) If he claims to act mentally or spiritually on the higher centres
of the brain and so to reach the diseased tissues, a cure is in the
highest degree unlikely, for a reason which will be given at a later
stage;
(2) If his method is avowedly quite empirical, and he only professes
to exercise a power which he does not even dimly understand, we must
respectfully ask for evidence, which can be examined and tested to the
satisfaction of a competent and impartial mind.
Now, as to the influence of ‘suggestion,’ whether or not accompanied
by other methods, e.g. hypnotism, magnetism, electricity, &c., on
(so-called) functional conditions, modern medical science speaks with
no uncertain voice.
At a meeting of the Harveian Society held last October, much
interesting information was produced.
A paper of great and permanent value was read by Dr. Claye Shaw on the
‘Influence of Mind as a therapeutic agent.’ It is impossible in the
space at my disposal to quote more than two brief extracts from his
paper. He thus defines ‘suggestion’:
‘Suggestion is the insinuation of a belief or impulse into the mind of
a subject by any means, or by words or questions, usually by emphatic
declaration; also the impulse of trust and submission which leads to
the effectiveness of such incitement.’
On the effects of treatment by suggestion, Dr. Claye Shaw writes:
‘It is with such conditions as chronic inebriety, opium, or the drug
habit, that suggestion is most powerful; with acute insanity I have not
seen it successful, and, though it has been fairly tested in asylum
practice, it has not obtained general recognition as a therapeutic
agent.’
A considerable number of medical men, alienists and others, took part
in the discussion which followed the reading of the paper.