THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF
DISEASE.
NOTHING in the evolution of human thought appears more
inevitable than the idea of supernatural intervention in
producing and curing disease. The causes of disease are so
intricate that they are reached only after ages of scientific
labour. In those periods when man sees everywhere miracle and
nowhere law,—when he attributes all things which he can not
understand to a will like his own,—he naturally ascribes his
diseases either to the wrath of a good being or to the malice of
an evil being.
This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class
with the healing art: a connection of which we have survivals
among rude tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in
nearly every ancient civilization—especially in the powers over
disease claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in
Assyria by the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of
AEsculapius, and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.
In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early
period, that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or
possessed by demons; the same belief comes constantly before us
in the great religions of India and China; and, as regards
Chaldea, the Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while
revealing the source of so many myths and legends transmitted to
the modern world through the book of Genesis, show especially
this idea of the healing of diseases by the casting out of
devils. A similar theory was elaborated in Persia. Naturally,
then, the Old Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of
religious and moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as
the leprosy of Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the
dysentery of Jehoram, the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal
illness of Asa, and many other ills, to the wrath of God or the
malice of Satan; while, in the New Testament, such examples as
the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting
out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of the person whom
"the devil ofttimes casteth into the fire"—of which case one of
the greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a
truer description of epilepsy—and various other episodes, show
this same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium
through which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician
were revealed to future generations.
In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in
producing bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also
came the first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really
scientific theory of medicine. Five hundred years before Christ,
in the bloom period of thought—the period of AEschylus, Phidias,
Pericles, Socrates, and Plato—appeared Hippocrates, one of the
greatest names in history. Quietly but thoroughly he broke away
from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid
the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation,
and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to
this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.
His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and
there medical science was developed yet further, especially by
such men as Herophilus and Erasistratus. Under their lead studies
in human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had
weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of
anatomical investigation without which there can be no real
results, was cast aside apparently forever.
But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of
events was set in motion which modified this development most
profoundly. The influence of Christianity on the healing art was
twofold: there was first a blessed impulse—the thought,
aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.
This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the
ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched.
Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest,
hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream. Of
these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick at
the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino
and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu
at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and
suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the
following centuries. Vitalized by this stream, all medieval
growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly. To say nothing of those at
an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great
charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and
thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit of Jesus to help
afflicted humanity. So, too, through all those ages we have a
succession of men and women devoting themselves to works of mercy,
culminating during modern times in saints like Vincent de Paul,
Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.
But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart
of the Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after
century, inspiring every development of mercy, there came from
those who organized the Church which bears his name, and from
those who afterward developed and directed it, another stream of
influence—a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions
of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest
historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew
and Christian sacred books.
The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in
relation to the cure of disease was mainly twofold: first, there
was a new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical
disease is produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan,
or by a combination of both, which theology was especially called
in to explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of
miraculous methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the
Divine anger, or of thwarting Satanic malice.
Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the
life of Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians,
legends of miracles grew luxuriantly. It would be utterly
unphilosophical to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud.
Whatever part priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry
discreditable developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends,
Century after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as
naturally as elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.