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/24

 learning were pushed forward, proved in the end inimical to the highest interests of the community, for religion and medicine found themselves carried farther and farther apart.

Before the stress of life became as severe as it is to-day, most common complaints could be overcome by rest and ordinary treatment. But under modern conditions of extreme complexity healing can no longer be conducted on such simple lines, and as time has gone on the effects of this divorce of medicine and religion have made themselves felt.

In correspondence with a more highly organised state of society, man has become a more highly organised being. He has developed faculties in excess of the man of, say, fifty years ago, and the exercise of these faculties, that depend for their operation on the nervous system, entails a strain on that system to which it was not exposed half a century back. The more elaborate the machinery the more ways in which it may get out of order. Man to-day is prone to a dozen nervous complaints whose existence our forefathers were happily able to ignore. Owing to climatic and other conditions that need not be discussed here, these nervous disorders first forced themselves on public attention in the United States of America. The overworked