a

Editorial Comment.

SICKNESS AND SIN.

Medical Standard.

MANY thousands of years ago an inspired poet, who was also a practical statesman, in one of his immortal odes from the human to the divine, gave expression to this remarkable and significant conjunction of attributes, "Who forgiveth all thine iniquities, who healeth all thy diseases;" and lest there should be any question as to the intentional nature of the antithesis, he merges the two qualities in a single expression, "Who redeemeth thy life from destruction." Several centuries later the Great Master of human life, whose philosophy has borne the test of previous and subsequent ages, gave utterance to the same profund identify of truth, in a more concrete and definite form, in relation to His own personal contact with disease. "Whether is easier," He asked the carping scribes, "to say, thy sins be forgiven thee, or take up thy bed and walk-except that ye may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins?"

It is not customary, as we are well aware, for medical journals to preach sermons from Bible texts; even medical ethics, alas, as promulgated from the high places, often have but slight relation to the doctrines of the Golden Rule. And it is rarely, indeed, that medical science, as a science, ever condescends to accept, much less seek for, lessons from philosophy and religion. It is, in fact, as we have frequently pointed out, the cardinal sin of latter day science that she has deserted the deductive method of reasoning for the inductive, the Socratic for the Baconic. She has ceased altogether to regard general truths, leaving them disastrously to the quack and the fanatic, and concerns herself only with particular facts. This she ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone.

It is far from our intention to construct upon our text a defense, or even a plea, for those systems of mental and so-called Christian Science which of late years have obtained so remarkable a hold upon the people; but it is well within our intention to insist, as we have insisted before, upon the fundamental element of truth dwelling in those systems in distorted form which might never have been so distorted had legitimate medical science given it proper heed and adequate expression.

We laugh derisively when we hear our Christian Scientist friends give utterance to their famous slogan, "Disease is an error of the mind." We would far better give earnest at

BALTIMORE

tention and wide circulation to the real truth contained in the much-ridiculed axiom, namely, that in its ultimate beginnings disease results from an error of the mind, a wrong attitude toward something or some purpose. We smile in a superior fashion when they cite us their familiar formula that "God is all and in all," and deduce therefrom that disease and sin do not really exist; we smile because we, of all men, know the stern reality of both. Yet it would become us far better to lift up our eyes once in a while unto the hills, whence cometh our real help. If we are so strongly entrenched in realities, then should we from our vantage ground, instead of ridiculing, interpret aright the truth which they distort, and proclaim it to mankind with the weight of our boasted authority, namely, that all physical ill has its root somewhere, sometime, in moral wrong—that knowledge is a part of the moral code-that in the day of perfect knowledge and obedience to which the world is slowly moving, disease will be unnecessary and unknown-and that to the extent that he hastens that time, every son of man has power on earth to forgive sin.

The late Professor Nothnagel used to say that in order to be a good clinician a physician must be a good man. The statement is only a specific application of a general truth. Expanded into a general axiom of philosophy, it means that in order to deal successfully with medicine one must deal with morals in all of their aspects, with citizenship and personal morality, and even spiritual qualities. The fountain head of health and disease is in the relations which men maintain toward themselves and their surroundings, in what our Christian Scientist friends term the attitude of the mind. Health and beauty spring from right living, from understanding the laws of life and obeying them-and that is morality. Disease and ugliness result in every case, sometimes directly, sometimes in the third and fourth generation, but always in the last analysis, from error of the mind, from some faulty (often deliberately sinful) attitude toward men and things-and that is immorality.

some

It is in these mental and moral fastnesses that disease and death must ultimately be attacked if they are to be successfully annihilated; and that is the final triumph of medical science. Nor is this truth valid only in the general aspects of medicine, but in its individual practice; not only in the mass, but in the unit. No conscientious practitioner can lightly disregard the mental and moral relationship of disease in his individual patients. Here, no less than in the aggregate, the fons