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.