“Do you realize, Doctor,” she resumed, “that the teaching 178 and preaching of disease for money is one of the greatest curses resting upon the world to-day? I never saw a doctor until I was on the boat coming to New York. And then I thought he was one of the greatest curiosities I had ever seen. I followed him about and listened to him talk to the passengers. And I learned that, like most of our young men, he had entered the practice of medicine under the pressure of dollars rather than altruism. Money is still the determining factor in the choice of a profession by our young men. And success and fortune in the medical profession, more than in any other, depend upon the credulity of the ignorant and helpless human mind.”
“Do you deny that great progress has been made in the curative arts?” he demanded. “See what we have done with diphtheria, with typhoid, with smallpox, and malaria!”
“Surely, Doctor, you can not believe that the mere temporary removing of a disease is real healing! You render one lot of microbes innocuous, after thousands of years of experimentation, and leave mankind subject to the rest. Then you render another set harmless. Do you expect to go on that way, making set after set of microbes harmless to the human body, and thus in time, after millions of years, eradicate disease entirely? Do you think that people will then cease to die? All the time you are working only in matter and through material modes. Do you expect thereby to render the human sense of life immortal? I think a sad disappointment awaits you. Your patients get well, only to fall sick again. And death to you is still as inevitable as ever, despite your boasted successes, is it not so?”
He broke into a bantering laugh, but did not reply.
“Doctor, the human mind is self-inoculated. It suffers from auto-infection. It makes its own disease microbes. It will keep on making them, until it is educated out of itself, and taught to do better. Then it will give place to the real reflection of divine mind; and human beings will be no more. Why don’t you realize this, you doctors, and get started on the right track? Your real work is in the mental realm. There you will find both cause and cure.”
“Well, I for one have little respect for faith cure––”
“Nor I,” she interposed. “Dependence upon material drugs, Doctor, is reliance upon the phenomena of the human mind. Faith cure is dependence upon the human mind itself, upon the noumenon, instead of the phenomenon. Do you see the difference? Hypnotism is mental suggestion, the suggestions being human and material, not divine truth. The drugging system is an outgrowth of the belief of life in matter. Faith 179 cure is the belief of life and power inherent in the human mind. One is no higher than the other. The origin of healing is shrouded in mythology, and every step of its so-called progress has been marked by superstition, dense ignorance, and fear. The first doctor that history records was the Shaman, or medicine-man, whose remedies reflected his mental status, and later found apt illustration in the brew concocted by Macbeth’s witches. And think you he has disappeared? Unbelievable as it may seem, it was only a short time ago that a case was reported from New York where the skin of a freshly killed black cat was applied as a remedy for an ailment that had refused to yield to the prescribed drugging! And only a few years ago some one applied to the Liverpool museum for permission to touch a sick child’s head with one of the prehistoric stone axes there exhibited.”
“That was mere superstition,” retorted the doctor.
“True,” said Carmen. “But materia medica is superstition incarnate. And because of the superstition that life and virtue and power are resident in matter, mankind have swallowed nearly everything known to material sense, in the hope that it would cure them of their own auto-infection. You remember what awful recipes Luther gave for disease, and his exclamation of gratitude: ‘How great is the mercy of God who has put such healing virtue in all manner of muck!’”
“Miss Carmen,” resumed the doctor, “we physicians are workers, not theorists. We handle conditions as we find them, not as they ought to be.”