Eddy Mary Baker - Mental Healers: Mesmer, Eddy and Freud

Every natural affliction is a reminder of a more exalted home.

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H EALTH IS NATURAL ; sickness is unnatural; at least so it seems to man. Health is taken as a matter of course, just as that the lungs breathe in air and the eyes react to light; it is the tranquil background which merges inconspicuously in the general well-being of life. Sickness, on the other hand, thrusts itself forward as an alien; hurls itself haphazard into the body, terrifying the soul, and arousing a multitude of problems and heart-searchings. Who can have sent this enemy into the camp of our lives? Has he come to stay, or can he be driven forth? Is he amenable to prayers or to commands? Having once got a firm grip, illness arouses many contradictory feelings in the mind: dread, faith, hope, despair, resentment, meekness, resignation, doubt. It teaches a man to think, to question, to pray, to raise his affrighted eyes heavenward and create there a being to whom he can confide his anxiety. Suffering first taught humanity to fashion a god, and thus engendered the religious sentiment.

Since good health is a natural attribute of man it is not to be explained, and demands no explanation. Yet the sufferer invariably tries to find a meaning for his suffering. Man has never had courage to face the fact that illness assails him quite senselessly, that there is no aim or purpose in the fever which consumes his body and causes every limb and muscle to ache and to burn. The absolute senselessness of pain, of an agony which for the nonce obliterates the whole of the moral world-order, is incomprehensible to humanity at large. Illness invariably appears to be sent by somebody, and the intangible being who sends it must, it would seem, have a reason for thrusting it upon the particular body in question. Some one must be angry with the afflicted man, must have a grudge to work off against him, must hate him. Some one must have a desire to punish him for committing a sin, a crime, for having transgressed a commandment. And this some one can be none other than he to whom all things are possible, he who sends his lightnings from, heaven, who scorches the fields with heat or devastates them with frost, who makes the stars to shine or blots out their effulgence, he who is almightyGod. From the dawn of human history, therefore, the occurrence of disease has been inseparably linked with religious thought and feeling.

The gods are responsible for illness; the gods alone have power to cure: this conviction is an invariable prelude to the rise of the art of healing. Primitive man was ignorant of his own powers; in face of sickness he was helpless, alone, weak; he knew of no other way than to turn to his gods for succour and beseech them not to forsake him in his need. The only curative art known to him was an appeal to magic, to prayer, to the sacrificial knife. He was defenceless against the all-powerful one who dwelt in the realm of the shades and against whom it was vain to struggle. It behoved a man, therefore, to be humble, to ask forgiveness, to pray, to beseech, in order that the pain might be removed. But how was the invisible deity to be reached? How was he to be addressed, seeing that none knew his abiding place? How prove to him ones penitence, ones subjection, ones willingness to make the expected sacrifice , ones desire to take a pledge of future good behaviour; how discover a means of communication? In its childhood days, humanity could give no answer to these questionings. God does not reveal himself to the ignorant, he does not note the everyday doings of poor, dumb mortals, does not deign to answer, does not incline his ear. Man in his distress had to seek a brother man to act as mediator between himself and god, a man wiser than himself, one with wider experience, who knew the words that would open the magic doors, that would conciliate the powers of darkness and would assuage the wrath of the unseen ruler. In primitive times the only mediator between man and god was the priest.

The fight against disease was, then, not a fight against a particular illness, but a hand-to-hand struggle to find god. All medical art, at the outset, takes a theological cast, becomes a cult, a ritual, a form of magic, a spiritual combat of man against divine chastening. Bodily suffering is not assuaged by technical manipulation, but through an act of faith. Illness is not analysed, one does not search out the causes of the affliction : on the contrary, one seeks god. One does not endeavour to treat disease, but to pray it out of existence; to repent that the ailment may be alleviated; to barter it away to god by vows, offerings, and ceremonies: for just as the sickness was sent by supernatural powers, so, too, it will be taken away by the same powers. Thus unity of sensation is contraposed to unity of phenomenon. There is a unit of disease and a unit of health, and for disease there is but one cause and one remedy: god. Between god and pain there is but one mediator: the priest, guardian of the body and of the soul. The world has not yet undergone division, it is not yet sundered; belief and knowledge form a unity in the sanctuary of the temple. Deliverance from suffering cannot be achieved without the intervention of spiritual powers, without rites and ceremonies, pledges and prayers. Thus the priests ply their medical art not in the spirit we now term scientific, but as a mystery. They study the strange movements of the stars, they interpret dreams, they master demons. Their magic cannot be learned by common mortals; it is handed on by tradition to the initiated from generation to generation; and although the priests have discovered much of medical science through experience, they never give purely practical advice. Invariably a cure is ascribed to miraculous intervention; hence the need for a sanctified enclosure wherein the miracle may be performed, to the accompaniment of prayer and in the very presence of the gods. When the patients mind and body have been thoroughly cleansed, then only is he in a fit condition to hear the holy words. The pilgrims who flocked to the temple at Epidaurus (where flourished the cult of sculapius), coming as they did from far and wide, bathed on the eve of the ceremonies, slew beasts for the sacrifice, and in the holy precincts slept the night upon the skins of the rams they had slaughtered. When morning came they told the priest their dreams, and awaited the sacerdotal interpretation: all these things being duly accomplished, the priest could bless them and administer medical aid. But the precondition of every cure was the uplifting of the heart to god as an act of faith; for he who desires the miracle of recovery must prepare himself in the appointed fashion. To the primitive mind, medical science is inseparable from divine doctrine; medical science and theology are one body and one soul.

But this primitive unity soon came to be broken up. If science is to become independent, if practical assistance is to be given to the patient and his symptoms are to be relieved, illness must be divested of its divine origin, and the religious formulas sacrificial offering, ritual, prayermust be proved to be entirely superfluous. At first the same individual combined the functions of doctor and priest; later, the two became rivals. This was the tragedy of Empedocles, who was both high priest and physician. The doctor, as a secular practitioner, tore away the supernatural trappings with which suffering had primitively been invested, and referred all pain to natural causation; he endeavoured by natural means, by simples, juices, solutions of mineral ores, and so forth, to calm the disorders within. The priest learned by degrees to limit his activities to the service of god, leaving the treatment of disease to the physician, who in his turn confined his energies to this field, renouncing spiritual exhortation, ritual, and magic. Once the two functions had been divorced, they developed along lines of their own. This tremendous severance of a sometime unity gave an entirely new turn to all the elements of the art of healing, and endowed them with fresh significance. First of all, the aggregate known as illness became broken up into innumerable separate ailments capable of classification. The process of disintegration resulted in a partial detachment of the disease from the spiritual personality of man. Henceforth, illness no longer encompassed the entire body but affected merely one of the bodily organs. Virchow said, in the course of a congress held at Rome: There are no general diseases. From now on, we shall recognize only diseases of organs and cells.