ONE HUNDRED CHRISTIAN SCIENCE CURES
BY
RICHARD C. CABOT, M.D.
What are we to think of the miraculous cures reported in Christian Science “experience meetings” and in the columns of the Christian Science journals? Are we to consider them as genuine and accurate records of fact, or are we to reject them as fabrications?
It would be easy to deal with the subject by driving Christian Scientists into a corner and logically refuting their claims; for if it is true, as stated on page 120 of “Science and Health,” that “health is not a condition of matter but of mind, nor can the material senses bear reliable testimony on this subject,” of course “the material senses” cannot be trusted when they testify that cancer, consumption, broken bones, or locomotor ataxia have been cured by Christian Science. There is no such thing as the diagnosis of these diseases without reliance on the testimony of “the material senses.”
But although it is easy thus to refute the Christian Scientists, such refutation satisfies no one and proves nothing except their logical bankruptcy. The victory over their weak-kneed theory is a barren one, for is it not notorious that people’s practice may be better than their theory? Skill in logic and in the accurate statement of one’s principles may be very slight, and yet the successful application of these misstated or absurd principles may be a fact and a blessing.
I shall therefore undertake to examine and to discuss Christian Science cures, not from the point of view of logic or consistency, but by a study of the written testimonials and of my own experience gained in the attempt to verify the claims of those who pronounce themselves cured.
Some years ago I followed up, so far as was possible through personal interviews and through letters, all the Christian Science “cures” of which I could hear any details in or near Boston. Within a short time I have returned to the subject and studied one hundred of the cases recorded in the recent volumes of the Christian Science Journal under the caption, “Testimonies from the Field.” Putting together this evidence and comparing it with my experience regarding the accuracy of my own patients’ statements about their own diseases, past and present, my conclusions are, first, that most Christian Science cures are probably genuine; but, second, that they are not the cures of organic diseases.
In my own personal researches into Christian Science “cures,” I have never found one in which there was any good evidence that cancer, consumption, or any other organic disease had been arrested or banished. The diagnosis was usually either made by the patient himself or was an interpretation at second or third hand of what a doctor was supposed to have said.
As I have followed up the reported cures of “cancer” and other malignant tumors, I have found either that they were not tumors at all, or that they were assumed to be malignant without any microscopic examination. In other words, the diagnosis was never based upon any proper evidence.
I have never seen any reason to believe that lies were told by the persons concerned. Their claims were the result of mistake or intellectual mistiness, and not of intentional deception. The cures no doubt took place as they asserted, but they were not cures of organic disease.
Now, before going further, something must be said in explanation of the terms “organic” and “functional” which I shall use throughout this paper. By organic disease is meant one that causes serious, perhaps permanent deterioration of the tissues of the body; by functional disease is meant one due to a perverted action of approximately normal organs. Functional diseases are no more imaginary than an ungovernable temper or a balky horse is imaginary. They are often the source of acute and long-continued suffering; indeed, I believe that there is no class of diseases that gives rise to so much keen suffering; but still they do not seriously damage the organs and tissues of the body. Organic disease, on the other hand, may run its course accompanied by much less suffering, but 473 the destruction of tissue is serious, perhaps irreparable.
The sharpness of this distinction between organic and functional troubles is somewhat blurred by the fact that a functional or nervous affection, such as insomnia, may lead, both directly and through loss of appetite, to a loss of weight or to a considerable deterioration in the body tissues. Here we have what might be called organic disease produced by functional disease, and such organic disease as this is often cured by Christian Science or by some more rational method of mental healing. We must also recognize the fact that there are a few rare diseases which we cannot certainly assign either to the organic or the functional class. Yet, despite these reservations, the distinction which the words indicate is still a clear one in the vast majority of cases.
Analysis of 100 “Cures”
Having made this definition of terms, I will go on to present herewith a table in which I have analyzed one hundred consecutive “testimonies” from the Christian Science Journal. I have grouped these cases in four classes:
First, seventy-two cases in which I find, on careful study, reasonably good evidence for the diagnosis of functional or nervous disorder.
Second, seven cases of what appears to be organic disease.
Third, eleven cases very difficult to class, but probably belonging in the functional group.
Fourth, ten cases, regarding the diagnosis of which no reasonable conjecture can be made.
These cases, arranged in the first three groups, are as follows:
Group I--Functional Or Nervous Disorders.
| “Nervous trouble” | 17 cases |
| “Trouble with eyes” | 12 cases |
| “Kidney and bladder trouble” | 7 cases |
| “An abnormal growth” | 5 cases |
| “Stomach trouble” | 4 cases |
| “Lung trouble” | 4 cases |
| “Rheumatism” | 3 cases |
| Drug habit | 3 cases |
| Tobacco habit | 2 cases |
| Alcoholism | 2 cases |
| “Asthmatic trouble” | 2 cases |
| “Irritable disposition” | 1 case |
| “The blues” | 1 case |
| Headache | 1 case |
| “Hardening of the spine” | 1 case |
| “Spinal trouble” | 1 case |
| “Weak back” | 1 case |
| “Sciatic trouble” | 1 case |
| “Chest and throat trouble” | 1 case |
| “Blindness” | 1 case |
| “Bowel trouble” | 1 case |
| “Heart trouble” | 1 case |
| Total | 72 cases |
Group II—Apparently Organic Diseases.
| “Tuberculosis of bowels” | 1 case |
| “Seventeen bruises, cuts and breaks” | 1 case |
| Insanity | 1 case |
| Locomotor ataxia | 1 case |
| Loose elbow-joint | 1 case |
| Necrosis of the jaw | 1 case |
| Rupture | 1 case |
| Total | 7 cases |
Group III—Probably Functional Disorders.
| “Lost use of the right limb” | 1 case |
| “What seemed to be a malignant sore on the face” | 1 case |
| “Strangely obstinate malady of 20 years’ standing” | 1 case |
| “An incurable disease” | 1 case |
| “Serious abdominal trouble” | 1 case |
| “Lung, spinal and hip trouble” (wore dark glasses 20 years) | 1 case |
| “Catarrhal, bowel and rheumatic trouble” | 1 case |
| “Internal disorder of 15 years’ standing” | 1 case |
| “Heart, ovarian, and serious nervous troubles” (8 years) | 1 case |
| “Debility, constipation, gout, piles, and prolapsus” | 1 case |
| “Bright’s disease, liver and lung complaint, and other ailments too numerous to mention” | 1 case |
| Total | 11 cases |
Of the second group, that of cases of apparently organic disease, the case of insanity was taken out of an insane asylum by Christian Science friends, but apparently is still insane; the diseased jaw slowly recovered, as such cases sometimes do, without any treatment. The same is very possibly true of the case of tuberculosis of the bowels (peritoneum), though the diagnosis is not certain. The cuts, bruises, and breaks healed rather slowly under ordinary surgical treatment in a hospital. Of the locomotor ataxia, the rupture, and the loose elbow-joint, nothing more can be said without knowing whether the diagnoses were correct—a point on which no opinion can be formed, owing to the scantiness of the facts recorded.
Unreliability of “Home-Made Diagnoses”
In the analyses of these cases I am guided by my experience with the diagnoses naïvely given by patients entering my office for treatment—diagnoses based either upon their own unguided observation or upon what they suppose their own physician to have said to them. In such instances there is no possible motive for deception or for exaggeration; the patient is saying exactly what he believes; and yet, I have rarely found his statement to be even approximately correct. For example, when a patient comes to me with the statement that he has “kidney 474 and bladder trouble,” I generally find both the kidneys and the bladder sound. The patient has pain in his back in the region where he supposes his kidneys to be; he interprets his symptoms in the light of what he has read in the newspaper advertisements and what he has been told by his kind friends, and arrives at what is (to his mind) a perfectly solid conclusion. He has no doubts of the diagnosis, states it as a fact, and asks only for treatment.
So it is with patients coming for “spinal trouble,” “hardening of the spine,” “inflammation of the spine,” or “spinal meningitis.” They almost always turn out, on careful examination, to be suffering from some form of nervous prostration. In the interpretation of their sufferings and in the names which they attach to them they have been guided quite innocently by hearsay.
Similarly when patients come to me for what they call “heart trouble” and turn out on examination to be suffering from pain in the left side of the chest without any heart trouble at all, I accuse them of no deception but only of incapacity for the accurate appreciation of the value of evidence.
Certain other statements recur very often in the histories given in all good faith by patients, whether in the doctor’s office or in a Christian Science experience meeting. I will quote some of these:
“I have had a great many doctors, and each has made a different diagnosis.”
“I am suffering from a complication of diseases, Bright’s disease, liver and lung complaint, and other ailments too numerous to mention.”
“I have had a great many operations performed on me.”
Experience shows us that when a person has had many doctors, many diagnoses, many “diseases,” or many operations, he usually turns out to be suffering from nervous prostration or some other form of functional nervous trouble. For these troubles are just those which most often puzzle the physician, leading him to change his diagnosis and the patient to change his doctor very frequently. Again, it is just these functional nervous disorders which, affecting as they do every part of the body and every organ, give rise to the false idea of “many diseases”—an idea based on the patient’s multitudinous sufferings.
Organic disease often runs its course accompanied by very little suffering, or with a very definite localization of the malady in one part of the body. The patient with a genuine complication of diseases does not often live to tell the story in a doctor’s office or in a Christian Science experience meeting. In the majority of the reported cases the complication is in the patient’s mind, not in his diseases.
For a similar reason the patient who has had “many operations” is usually one whose (nervous) sufferings are so manifold and so various that physicians are driven to seek relief by one measure after another, and finally by a variety of surgical procedures.
It is a striking fact that, as one listens to the recital of Christian Science “cures,” one hears little or nothing of the great common organic diseases, such as arterio-sclerosis, phthisis, appendicitis—and still less of the common acute diseases, such as pneumonia, malaria, apoplexy. Chronic nervous (that is, mental) disease is the Christian Scientist’s stock in trade.
Similarity of Christian Science Testimony
No one can study the printed records of Christian Science cures without noting a remarkable similarity running through many hundreds of them, a similarity in style, in phraseology, and in the general structure of the letters.
For example, Mrs. Eddy’s name was mentioned within five lines of the end in fifty-six out of seventy-five letters which I have recently examined. I have excluded here all cases in which Mrs. Eddy’s name was mentioned earlier in the letter. It seems hardly likely that all these writers would spontaneously bring in the name of their leader precisely in this position in the letter.
In twelve out of seventy-five letters the rather unusual phrase materia medica occurs.
The price of treatment under Christian Science and under the previous medical care is mentioned in a large proportion of these letters.
Not one of these letters mentions the name of any doctor connected at any time with the case. From personal experience with similar stories heard from my own patients and from the lips of Christian Scientists, I know that doctors’ names are usually mentioned. It seems unlikely that in one hundred consecutive testimonies the physicians’ names should have been spontaneously omitted.
For these reasons one cannot help believing either that these letters have been liberally edited, or that their writers have been much influenced by reading or hearing of similar cases. This does not necessarily imply any charge of intentional deception, but weakens very considerably their value as evidence.
“Natural Selection” in the Christian Science Clinic
The persistence of Christian Scientists in the belief that they can cure organic disease, a belief 475 which I consider genuine in the majority of cases, is probably due to the following reason: By a curious process of “natural selection,” a patient suffering from organic disease rarely consults a Christian Scientist, just as he rarely consults an osteopath. Being ignorant of diagnosis, the Christian Scientist is not aware of this fact and supposes that he is treating, not a selected group of cases of functional disease, but all disease. This mistake is all the more natural because the Christian Scientist, with the natural credulity of the half-educated, accepts the patient’s own diagnosis at its face value or trusts the hearsay report of what some doctor is supposed to have said.
The same interesting process of “natural selection” accounts for the fact that Christian Scientists are so rarely the cause of death to those whom they treat. It is undoubtedly true that deaths occasionally occur (for example, from diphtheria) which are directly traceable to the fatal inactivity and ignorance of a Christian Scientist. But such deaths are in my opinion rare. They are pretty sure to give rise to newspaper notoriety and so to become widely known, yet one does not hear of many such in the course of a year, for common sense steers the great majority of sufferers from organic disease away from the parlors of the Christian Scientist.
“Doctors Who Flood the World with Disease”
It is impossible to study the evidence for and against the so-called Christian Science cures without crossing the track of many an incapable doctor. Indeed, there can be no candid criticism of Christian Science methods that does not involve also an arraignment of existing medical methods. It is not difficult to perceive, as one studies the testimonies recorded in the Christian Science Journal, that many patients have been driven into Christian Science by a multitude of shifting and mistaken diagnoses, by the gross abuse of drugs, especially of morphine, and by the total neglect of rational psychotherapy on the part of many physicians. No doubt these causes account only for a certain fraction of the desertions to Christian Science. There are many patients who have so little patience and so much credulity that they desert their doctors for no good reason whatever; but I believe that these cases are in the minority, and that the success of the Christian Science movement is due largely to the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of a certain proportion of the medical profession.
I can see some foundation even for such an exaggerated charge as that the doctors “are flooding the world with disease”—a favorite expression of Mrs. Eddy’s. No one who has seen much of the nervous or hysterical affections following railway accidents and of the methods not infrequently used, not only by lawyers, but by doctors, to make the sufferers believe that they are sicker than they really are, can deny that there is some truth in Mrs. Eddy’s charge. Even in her irrational denunciations of hygiene, one cannot help seeing some grain of truth when one reads or hears of the multitude of petty prudences and “old womanish” superstitions not infrequently exploited by school teachers, parents, and teachers of physical culture, under the name of “hygiene.”
The Classic Methods Used by Christian Science
Believing, then, as I do, that most Christian Science cures are genuine—genuine cures of functional disease—the question arises whether the special methods of mental healing employed by Christian Scientists differ from other methods of mental healing, such as are employed by the best neurologists, both in this country and in Europe.
Of the classical methods of psychotherapeutics, namely, explanation, education, psychoanalysis, encouragement, suggestion, rest-cure and work-cure, the Christian Scientists use chiefly suggestion, education, and work-cure, though each of these methods is colored and shaped by the peculiar doctrines of the sect.
The quack who sells magic handkerchiefs supposed to be endowed with miraculous healing powers by the touch of his sacred hand, the priests who exploit the “healing springs” at Lourdes, and the doctor who gives a bread pill or a highly diluted homeopathic drug, may cure a patient by what is known as “suggestion,” that is, by producing in the patient a strong belief that he will get well. Christian Science suggestion takes the form of “silent treatment” and “absent treatment,” in which the patient is influenced by the auto-suggestions of health which the silent pressure of the “practitioner” or the knowledge of the “absent treatment” leads him to make.
Christian Science education consists in the reading of “Science and Health,” of the Bible, as interpreted by Mrs. Eddy (after Quimby), and of the teachings received at the hands of Christian Science practitioners. Although there is much that is false and harmful in the education thus received, I believe that a good many warped minds do find in it the corrective twist which they need—just as a certain type of crooked spine may be helped by a violent twist in the other direction.
Work-cure is, I think, the sanest and most helpful part of Christian Science, as of all other types of psychotherapy. The Christian Scientists do set idle people to work and turn inverted attention outward upon the world. This is a great service—the greatest, I think, that can be done to a human being. By setting their patients to the work of healing and teaching others, Christian Scientists have wisely availed themselves of the greatest healing power on earth.
I believe that suggestion, education, and work-cure can be used in far safer and saner ways by physicians, social workers, and teachers or clergymen properly trained for the work than by the Christian Scientists. Heretofore these last have held the field of psychotherapy largely without competition. American physicians have confined themselves mostly to physical and chemical methods (diet, drugs, and surgery), which have a place in the cure of functional disease, but not, I think, the chief place.
Now that scientific psychotherapy is being taken up by physicians, social workers, and educators (including the clergy), not instead of, but in conjunction with physical and chemical treatment, I think it is reasonable to expect that Christian Science will have to stick closer to the truth if it is to hold its ground in competition.