“Don’t they demonstrate the absolute inability of medicines to cure disease?” she asked. “Any more than putting men in prison cures crime?” she added as an afterthought.
“They at least prove that medication has not permanently removed disease,” he ventured, not wishing to go too far.
“Doctor,” she said earnestly, “that man Jesus, who, according to you, came too soon, said: ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’ Well, didn’t he come very, very close to the truth when he made that statement? He did not say that without drugs or material remedies we could do nothing, but that without the Christ-principle mankind would continue, as before, to miss the mark. He showed that disease and discord result from sin. Sin is lack of righteousness, lack of right-thinking about things. It is wrong belief, false thought. Sin is mental. Its effect, disease, is mental––a state of discordant consciousness. Can you with drugs change a state of mind?”
“Certainly,” he replied quickly. “Whiskey and opium cause changes in one’s state of mind.”
“No,” she answered. “But the human belief of power inherent in whiskey and opium, or of the human body’s reaction to them, causes a change in the human thought-activity that is called consciousness. The state of human consciousness changes with the belief, but not the real state of mind. Can you not see that? And Doctor Bolton––”
“Bolton was not sick. He died of natural causes, old age, and general breakdown,” was the doctor’s refuge.
Carmen laughed and sprang down from the table. “What an obstinately obdurate lot you scientific men are!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know that you doctors are only a development of the old ‘medicine-man’? Now in the first place, Mr. Bolton isn’t dead; and, in the second, there are no natural causes of death. Old age? Why, that’s gone out of fashion, long since.”
“You deny senile changes––?”
“I deny every human error!” she interrupted.