Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/823

Rh Still another case was reported in "The New York Times":

Chicago, May 30th.—There is another unpleasant case for the faith-healers to explain. Mrs. Mary Reiter, a young woman, came to this city from Valparaiso, Ind., recently, suffering from pulmonary troubles, and put herself under the care of Mrs. J. C. Barker, a Christian Scientist, for treatment. She died last night, and the faith-healer being unable to give a death-certificate, the coroner to-day took up the case.

Like Dr. Frog in the fable, these physicians also fail to cure themselves. Arlo Bates writes to the “Providence Journal” that a prominent Boston dentist was called from his bed at two o'clock one morning to go to the relief of a lady who was suffering the agonies of toothache. He at first declined to go, but finally went, relieved her pain, and went again in the daytime to do something more to the teeth. He had not taken much notice of the name given him at his first visit, but on reaching the house the second time his eye fell on the door-plate, and he found that he had been called in such hot haste to relieve the pain of one who makes a handsome income by teaching that there is no such thing as pain. His patient was a shining light of Christian Science, but she could not cure her own toothache!

Mr. Charles M. Barrows mentions the following cases in his “Facts and Fictions of Mental Healing”: “About three years ago a well-known citizen of Boston was thoroughly cured, to all appearance, of a distressing chronic malady, and embraced the doctrines advocated by his healer, a ‘Christian Scientist.’ He also became a very successful healer of others, and was so confident in his own ability to resist disease that he frequently declared it was impossible for him ever to be sick. Yet within a twelvemonth this same man, who sincerely thought he had risen superior to all finite ills, was hurried to the grave by a hæmorrhage of the lungs. During the past year four active mental healers have succumbed to the fell destroyer of mortal life; and only last summer one of the great lights of ‘Christian Science’ was prostrated with nervous exhaustion and obliged to seek medical aid.”

Any theory of physics or chemistry which admitted of such utter failures as Christian Science suffers would be pronounced, even by its friends, unworthy the name of science. Mrs. Eddy does not take these failures as indications that her theory needs modifying, but throws the blame of them upon her luckless disciples. She says to her pupils, “If you fail to succeed in any case, it is because you have not demonstrated the rule and proved the principle.” She and her theory remain infallible, but she has avoided inconvenient tests of her own powers of late years, and prints in her book this note: “The authoress takes no patients,