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THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN SCIENCE.
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selves to the varying correspondence. "The brutes," says Dr. Wilkinson, "know better than to resign themselves to doing nothing under natural afflictions; they lick their sores, and seek their herbs; and the domestic animals bring their sorrows of this kind to man, and assume a kind of patience under the treatment he enjoins. We therefore reckon that any medical practice which has had a few precedents to correct it, is better than that profession of nothing, to which some of our brethren have directed their hopes. It is equally true that many cases would have recovered better by simply watching, and the application of a few obvious means mostly suggested by the patient's feelings, than where a large apparatus of drugs has been employed." Nevertheless, drugs, as well as the simpler alleviating means, have their use; and one of the uses assigned to them by Swedenborg is, "that they conduce to absorbing malignities, thus also to cures"[1] This is the key to the theory of cure which probably led the Doctor to write the following:

"Drugs act as representatives of spiritual ideas, curing by laws entirely unknown to the physician, while he is congratulating himself that he is bringing about a cure accord-
  1. Divine Love and Wisdom, n. 336.