Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/101

 THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENT

, M.D.

In considering the subject of Religion and Medicine, we shall be helped by looking back to the beginnings of things, when people first realised that illnesses existed, and that certain of them were curable. They knew nothing of internal anatomy or physiology, nothing of the origin and treatment of disease, nothing of its infectious, communicable character. The treatment, or, at any rate, the healing of disease, must have been by means of what seemed to be mental influences in those early ages. Why, our very word 'Influenza,' revived within comparatively recent years, shows how vaguely and imperfectly was understood a disease which now we recognise as having a definite train of symptoms, but of which we still know so little that we speak of it merely as an influence.

The idea of mental influence in disease was