Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/72

66 physician the more anxious, in this age, to prevent disease, for he realizes it is much easier to remove the cause than to help the body in its efforts to throw off the attack. By the purification of drinking water he has greatly reduced the amount of disease from typhoid; by furnishing pure milk the sickness and death of infancy have become much less; by recommending life in pure air tuberculosis is less frequent, etc. Mere faith or mind cure has done and can do nothing of the sort. Medical teaching has also warned against intemperance of all kinds, and against other insidious destroyers of bodily harmony.

The physician has in all ages made use of mental treatment, for, no matter what his remedy in physical form, there has always gone with it a grain of hope. Where he finds the mind especially at fault he may even appeal to it directly, and thus relieve suffering which had its origin chiefly in mental depression or in a too exuberant and untutored imagination. He often succeeds in producing more harmony in bodily working by establishing a happier mental and moral view of life.

As the prevention of the entrance of bacteria or of any other injurious agent into the body is far more economical than the helping to overcome the damages these may produce, so the prevention of unhappy and unhealthy mental states is far better than an attempt to restore a mind to right habits from which it has lapsed.

In primitive times one minister looked after both the spiritual and bodily health of the individual. As the doctor of medicine later assumed the cure of the body, so the doctor of divinity took as his special province the cure of the soul. Mind and body react upon each other, and he who ministers to the one can not but influence the other to some extent. While the priest has abundant opportunity for helping to heal soul-injuries, his larger work, like that of the physician, lies in surrounding those he would help with better social conditions, and in developing, through religious and philosophic training, their individual powers of resistance to the stresses to which the moral nature is daily subjected. For both physical and spiritual ailments prevention is far easier and better than cure.