University of Virginia Library

Testimony of medical teachers

With due respect for the faculty, I kindly quote from Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famous Philadelphia teacher of medical practice. He declared that "it is impossible to calculate the mischief

which Hippocrates has done, by first marking Nature with his name, and afterward letting her loose upon sick people."

Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Professor in Harvard Uni- versity, declared himself "sick of learned quackery."

Dr. James Johnson, Surgeon to William IV, King Of England, said:

"I declare my conscientious opinion, founded on long observation and reflection, that if there were not a single physician, surgeon, apothecary, man-midwife, chemist, druggist, or drug on the face of the earth, there would be less sickness and less mortality."

Dr. Mason Good, a learned Professor in London, said:

"The effects of medicine on the human system are in the highest degree uncertain; except, indeed, that it has already destroyed more lives than war, pestilence, and famine, all combined."

Dr. Chapman, Professor of the Institutes and Practice of Physic in the University of Pennsylvania, in a published essay said:

"Consulting the records of our science, we cannot help being disgusted with the multitude of hypotheses obtruded upon us at different times. Nowhere is the imagination displayed to a greater extent; and perhaps so ample an exhibition of human invention might gratify our vanity, if it were not more than compensated by the humiliating view of so much absurdity, contradiction, and falsehood. To harmonize the contrarieties of med- ical doctrines is indeed a task as impractible as to arrange the fleeting vapors around us, or to reconcile the fixed and repulsive antipathies of nature. Dark and

perplexed, our devious career resembles the groping of Homer's Cyclops around his cave."

Sir John Forbes, M.D., F.R.S., Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, London, said:

"No systematic or theoretical classification of diseases or of therapeutic agents, ever yet promulgated, is true, or anything like the truth, and none can be adopted as a safe guidance in practice."

It is just to say that generally the cultured class of medi- cal practitioners are grand men and women, therefore they are more scientific than are false claimants to Chris- tian Science. But all human systems based on material premises are minus the unction of divine Science. Much yet remains to be said and done before all mankind is saved and all the mental microbes of sin and all diseased thought-germs are exterminated.

If you or I should appear to die, we should not be dead. The seeming decease, caused by a majority of human beliefs that man must die, or produced by mental assassins, does not in the least disprove Christian Science; rather does it evidence the truth of its basic proposition that mortal thoughts in belief rule the materiality mis- called life in the body or in matter. But the forever fact remains paramount that Life, Truth, and Love save from sin, disease, and death. "When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality [divine Science], then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory" (St. Paul).