Essays In Pastoral Medicine

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LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY 1906
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Copyright, 1906 By Longmans, Green, and Co. All rights reserved. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
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The term Pastoral Medicine is somewhat difficult to define because it comprises unrelated material ranging from disinfection to foeticide. It presents that part of medicine which is of import to a pastor in his cure, and those divisions of ethics and moral theology which concern a physician in his practice. It sets forth facts and principles whereby the physician himself or his pastor may direct the operator's conscience whenever medicine takes on a moral quality, and it also explains to the pastor, who must often minister to a mind diseased, certain medical truths which will soften harsh judgments, and other facts, which may be indifferent morally but which assist him in the proper conduct of his work, especially as an educator. Pastoral medicine is not to be confused with the code of rules commonly called medical ethics.
The material of pastoral medicine requires constantly renewed discussion, because medicine in general is progressive enough frequently to devise better methods of diagnosis and treatment, and thus the postulates of the moral questions involved are changed. This discussion, however, is not easily made. The facts upon which the ethical part of pastoral medicine rests are furnished by the physician for the consideration and judgment of the moralist—the physician educated after modern methods knows little or nothing of ethics and can not himself make accurate moral decisions. The moralist, on the other hand, is commonly a poor counsellor to the physician, because long training in medicine is needed before the physical data of the moral decisions is comprehended. The physician, therefore, is at a loss to determine what he may or may not do in {vi} cases that involve the greatest moral responsibility, and the priest is a hesitating guide because the moral theologies do not convincingly present the doctrine in these cases.