THE PATIENT
By Stephen Paget, F.R.C.S.
The Bishop of Birmingham wrote to me, last year, the following letter. He gave me leave to publish it in the second edition of a book of mine about Christian Science: and he gives me leave to publish it again here:
‘. . . I should wish to make a little more of your admissions as to Mental Therapeutics. Thus—If, as you admit, there are so many functional disorders; and they are curable by mental influences; and religion is a great mental influence; and this influence (“Quietism”) is much needed in such and other cases—I should demand of the Church that it should recognise, far more explicitly, this field of legitimate curative power, and control it, and claim it by showing the power to use it. The neglect of this sphere of influence by the Church plays into the hands of Christian Science. (All this could be associated with the revival of unction.)
‘Also, I think the medical profession likes—in public—to ignore all this, and thus in itsturn plays into the hands of pseudo-theology. My criticism is that I want your “admissions” made the basis of a more positive claim both on the Church and on the medical profession.
‘My own experience in the case of well-to-do people when sick or dying is that the medical profession is very much inclined to exclude religion in any form from sick beds till it cannot be of any use. I do most seriously want to reform (1) the Church, (2) the medical profession, in the light of what you admit.’
This wise letter says all, to my thinking, that need be said as to the duty of the doctor towards the cleric, and the duty of the cleric towards the doctor. It says not a word about the signs and wonders alleged by the Society of Emmanuel in London: and I hope that Dr. Gore, by his silence, condemns them, as not worthy of credence. I hope, also, and am sure, that in a few years we shall hear less about that Society. Meanwhile, I should like to say something about one aspect of this matter of ‘spiritual healing,’ which has not received so much attention as it deserves. We have heard all about the cleric, all about the doctor: and we are in danger, I think, of forgetting the patient. We have been tempted to believe that the patient, somehow, belongs to the cleric and the doctor. That we may clear ourminds of this mistake, let us put ourselves in the patient’s place. Most of us, I suppose, know that place: I have been there half a dozen times. It is the centre of a great planetary system of kind people. Home love, and the affection of my friends, and the pleasant goodwill of the servants, and the wisdom and the gentleness of doctors and of nurses, and all prayers for my recovery, wheeled round me, each in its appointed course. There I lay, and was watched, like a big baby: and these activities of the spiritual life encircled me, day and night, till I got better. The point is, that it all came naturally to everybody. It was the habit of the home, it was our usual way of doing things. My friends did not suddenly begin to care for me: the doctors and the nurses did not suddenly begin to be gentle: the maids were not stung by the splendour of a sudden thought for my comfort: the use of prayer on my behalf was nothing new. Everybody was kind to me, because everybody in the house always is kind to me. They made me comfortable, and one prayed for me, because they are always making me comfortable, and one daily prays for me. All of us, except myself, were doing what we always do: and I was being what I always am.
Illness, nine times out of ten, no morechanges a man than sleep and exercise change him. As by a long sleep, or a long day in the open air, we gain tranquillity, insight, and self-judgment, so, by an illness, we gain, if we will, a like measure of self-improvement. The same good thoughts come to us, as we lie idle in a sick-bed, which come to us as we lie idle, in holiday time, on a hillside. An illness, apart from its drawbacks, is in reality a sort of holiday, a dull but not unprofitable vacation, something halfway between a real holiday and what religious people call a retreat. There is no sudden change in the patient’s mind and outlook: only, there is more inlook, more self-doubt, more quietness of vision.
One day, I shall put myself in the patient’s place, and not come out of it: I shall not get well, but die. On that occasion, the love, sympathy, goodwill, medical attendance, and prayers, will be the same as before. They will swing round me once more, each in its proper sphere, these familiar angels and ministers of grace defending me. But, as I begin to stop, so they will begin to stop. It will become absurd, for my friends to call and ask after me; absurd, for the household to devise plans for my comfort; absurd, for the doctors to try to feel what is left of my pulse; absurd, for anybody to pray for myrecovery. Spiritual processes are blessed with plenty of common-sense: they leave off, when it becomes downright foolishness to go on. Let them leave what remains of me, and start again round another centre.
They who desire, extravagantly, to put ‘spiritual healing’ among the methods of the Christian ministry, seem to me to be losing sight of this fact, that common-sense is an essential part of the spiritual life. Common-sense tells me, that as I was intended to live, so I am intended to die. I cannot see any reason, human or divine, why I should live to old age, and die of that. I would rather not: anyhow, I see no reason why I should. God, who brought me into the world by my mother’s pain, will some day put me out of the world, by my own pain. He is in no sense more on the side of life than on the side of death. I have been looking at the ‘Order for the Visitation of the Sick’ in the Prayer-book and I am quite sure that nobody now could write anything half so sensible or so majestical. . . .Know this, that Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining, as youth, strength, health, age, weakness, and sickness. Wherefore, whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly, that it is God’s visitation.And the prayer fora sick child, also, seems to me a very sensible and beautiful piece of writing. I find, also, a prayer for a sick person, ‘when there appeareth small hope of recovery.’ I have heard it read over one at the point of death, when there was no hope at all of recovery. ‘We know,’ it says, ‘that, if Thou wilt, Thou canst even yet raise him up.’ I hope that I shall not, when I am dying, hear this phrase. It rings false, to my thinking: it offends the natural dignity of a dying man. We doctors are blamed, now and again, for not telling the truth to patients hopelessly ill: but here is the Prayer-book, at the last moment, hardly more straightforward. All the same, this Order for the Visitation of the Sick is admirable; and I desire to contrast it with the following instance, how Christian Science treats the dying:
‘Mrs. —— is a widow, and an old friend of mine. In February 1905, her only child, a boy of eleven, was in the last stage of a hopeless illness—mitral valvular heart disease, with rheumatism and dropsy. I had an opportunity of a few minutes’ talk with the Christian Science “practitioner”—a sweet, gentle, earnest woman—and asked her if she really thought she would do any good. “Oh yes,” she replied, with a smile of confidence; “I have never known a failure.” “But,” I suggested, “theboy is very seriously ill:” and I explained the nature of his complaint. Still confidently smiling, the practitioner replied, “We have had worse cases than this.” I told her the best medical advice had been taken, and the doctors had all given the boy up. Upon which the lady remarked, with gentle emphasis, “Godhas not given him up.” That of course was conclusive, and I left her to do her best. I went away at ten o’clock, and then the Scientist seated herself by the patient, read to him from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s book, and exhorted him in some such language as this: “You must not think you are ill, my dear little boy. You arenotill: youcan’tbe ill. God would not make you ill. He made all things good, but not illness”—and so on, and so on. The boy, I am told, heard her patiently but wearily, and at one-thirty he died. Then the practitioner gathered up her books and papers and went away, and that is the end of the story.’
Here we have Christian Science in a favourable light: all the same, it is not a pleasant picture, these falsehoods told to a dying child. If it be not true that God ‘makes illness,’ and if it be not true that God ‘gives us up,’ then I attach no meaning at all to that Name.
Let us put ourselves at that point of thecase where there appeareth small hope of recovery. The doctors have given the patient up. God, in their opinion, has done the same. The cleric will not say that, not in so many words:Yet, he says,forasmuch as in all appearance the time of his dissolution draweth near, so fit and prepare him, we beseech Thee, against the hour of death, that after his departure hence in peace, and in Thy favour, his soul may be received into Thine everlasting Kingdom. The cleric does not pray for the patient’s recovery. He does not expect anything to happen, save the patient’s death. He will not point-blank deny the possibility of a miracle: but he neither asks for anything to happen, nor, so far as I can see, wants anything to happen: he only cares to be sure that the patient, who is fast going, shall go the right way.
It is here, on this edge of time between life and death, that the professional spiritual healer loves to perform. He desires to make something happen: he will not take it for granted that nothing will happen.
His position is logical, and may be held in absolute sincerity. Only, he is bound to tell us what, in his experience, does happen: and he is bound to tell us of every case of failure, or partial failure. And we are bound to examine, test, cross-examine, criticise, analyse, watch,and almost spy upon every scrap of his work; and that in a spirit of hard and well-nigh brutal indifference to his belief in himself as a channel of divine intervention. What else does he expect of us? What else are we here for?
Among a pile of letters and pamphlets on my table is a tract called ‘New Eyes in answer to Prayer.’ It gives the case of Mr. Evison, of Grimsby. He had something the matter with his eyes. At last, ‘while walking out with a friend one day, I put my hand in my pocket for something, and dropped it on the ground: on stooping down to pick it up, the remaining pieces of my eyes dropped out of their sockets on to the ground. They were about the size of the kernel of a nut.’ So he went to a ‘Divine Healing Home,’ where he was anointed with oil in the name of the Lord. Ten days later, as he was praying in his bedroom, he felt two warm fingers touch his empty sockets, and they became warm. Later, at a prayer meeting, his eyes ‘came wide open,’ and he saw perfectly. Next day he testified to his recovery; and, says the tract, ‘When this testimony was given by Mr. Evison, there were fifty-seven cases of blindness restored in answer to prayer.’
I feel sure that the writer of this tract thought that he was telling the truth. AndI am no less sure that a great deal of ‘spiritual healing’ is just as worthless, just as untrue, as these Grimsby miracles. Till the alleged wonders of spiritual healing, and its unpublished failures, have been all submitted to keen scrutiny, and to every severest and most searching test that can be devised in science, nobody who knows anything about pathology can take much interest in them. So I come back to the Bishop of Birmingham’s wise eirenicon.
It is a great pity that the work of the cleric and the work of the doctor should ever clash; for they are ordained (the Prayer-book again) for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other. Only, if they are to be friends in ministering to the sick and the dying, they must be friends always. If, in social life, they do not get on well together, they will not work together well in the sick-room. If the doctor makes stupid jokes against religion, and the cleric doses his parishioners with quack medicines; if the doctor is dull to the wonders of faith, and the cleric is dull to the wonders of science: if neither has the grace to recognise and honour and openly praise the good works of the other—how shall they adjust themselves, in the presence of impending death, who thus waste the opportunities of daily life?
THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENTBYJANE WALKER, M.D.PHYSICIAN, NEW HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN
THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENT
BYJANE WALKER, M.D.PHYSICIAN, NEW HOSPITAL FOR WOMEN