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Chapter 13 - From Miracles to Medicine
Final Breaking Away of the Theological Theory in Medicine
While this development of history was going on, the central
idea on which the whole theologic view rested - the idea of
diseases as resulting from the wrath of God or malice of
Satan - was steadily weakened; and, out of the many things which
show this, one may be selected as indicating the drift of thought
among theologians themselves.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent
divines of the American branch of the Anglican Church framed
their Book of Common Prayer. Abounding as it does in evidences
of their wisdom and piety, few things are more noteworthy than a
change made in the exhortation to the faithful to present
themselves at the communion. While, in the old form laid down in
the English Prayer Book, the minister was required to warn his
flock not "to kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us
with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the
American form all this and more of similar import in various
services was left out.
Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid
indeed, and at no period more so than during the last half of the
nineteenth century.
The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the
theological hold upon medical education has been almost entirely
relaxed. In three great fields, especially, discoveries have been
made which have done much to disperse the atmosphere of miracle.
First, there has come knowledge regarding the relation between
imagination and medicine, which, though still defective, is of
great importance. This relation has been noted during the whole
history of the science. When the soldiers of the Prince of
Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of scurvy by
scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials
filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave
out that it was a very rare and precious medicine - a medicine of
such virtue that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a
gallon of water, and that it had been obtained from the East with
great difficulty and danger." This statement, made with much
solemnity, deeply impressed the soldiers; they took the medicine
eagerly, and great numbers recovered rapidly. Again, two
centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed to apply the
bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients at
Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for
disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application
of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by
this application alone, without any use of the gases whatever.
Innumerable cases of this sort have thrown a flood of light upon
such cures as those wrought by Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic
tractors," and by a multitude of other agencies temporarily in
vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous cures which in past
ages have been so frequent and of which a few survive.
The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last
half-century many scattered indications have been collected and
supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and
especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France. Here, too,
great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred to
miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger, of
Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his fears "lest
accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"
denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the
singular argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly
incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to
consider it at all. But investigations in hypnotism still go on,
and may do much in the twentieth century to carry the world yet
further from the realm of the miraculous.
In a third field science has won a striking series of
victories. Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of
Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller
in the eighteenth, and developed or applied with wonderful skill
by Ehrenberg, Cohn, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and
their compeers in the nineteenth, has explained the origin and
proposed the prevention or cure of various diseases widely
prevailing, which until recently have been generally held to be
"inscrutable providences." Finally, the closer study of
psychology, especially in its relations to folklore, has revealed
processes involved in the development of myths and legends: the
phenomena of "expectant attention," the tendency to
marvel-mongering, and the feeling of "joy in believing."
In summing up the history of this long struggle between
science and theology, two main facts are to be noted: First, that
in proportion as the world approached the "ages of faith" it
receded from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world
has receded from the "ages of faith" it has approached
ascertained truth; secondly, that, in proportion as the grasp of
theology Upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in
proportion as that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been developed.
The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical
discoveries, yet they have already taken from theology what was
formerly its strongest province - sweeping away from this vast
field of human effort that belief in miracles which for more than
twenty centuries has been the main stumblingblock in the path of
medicine; and in doing this they have cleared higher paths not
only for science, but for religion.
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