THE RELATION OF PRIEST AND DOCTOR TO PATIENT
By Jane Walker, M.D.
In considering the subject of Religion and
Medicine, we shall be helped by looking back
to the beginnings of things, when people first
realised that illnesses existed, and that certain
of them were curable. They knew nothing of
internal anatomy or physiology, nothing of
the origin and treatment of disease, nothing
of its infectious, communicable character.
The treatment, or, at any rate, the healing of
disease, must have been by means of what
seemed to be mental influences in those
early ages. Why, our very word 'Influenza,'
revived within comparatively recent years,
shows how vaguely and imperfectly was understood
a disease which now we recognise as
having a definite train of symptoms, but of
which we still know so little that we speak
of it merely as an influence.
The idea of mental influence in disease was
