66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



physician the more anxious, in this age, to prevent disease, for he realizes 

 it is much easier to remove the cause than to help the body in its efforts 

 to throw off the attack. By the purification of drinking water he has 

 greatly reduced the amount of disease from typhoid; by furnishing 

 pure milk the sickness and death of infancy have become much less ; by 

 recommending life in pure air tuberculosis is less frequent, etc. Mere 

 faith or mind cure has done and can do nothing of the sort. Medical 

 teaching has also warned against intemperance of all kinds, and against 

 other insidious destroyers of bodily harmony. 



The physician has in all ages made use of mental treatment, for, 

 no matter what his remedy in physical form, there has always gone 

 with it a grain of hope. Where he finds the mind especially at fault 

 he may even appeal to it directly, and thus relieve suffering which had 

 its origin chiefly in mental depression or in a too exuberant and untu- 

 tored imagination. He often succeeds in producing more harmony in 

 bodily working by establishing a happier mental and moral view of life. 



As the prevention of the entrance of bacteria or of any other 

 injurious agent into the body is far more economical than the helping 

 to overcome the damages these may produce, so the prevention of 

 unhappy and unhealthy mental states is far better than an attempt to 

 restore a mind to right habits from which it has lapsed. 



In primitive times one minister looked after both the spiritual and 

 bodily health of the individual. As the doctor of medicine later as- 

 sumed the cure of the body, so the doctor of divinity took as his special 

 province the cure of the soul. Mind and body react upon each other, 

 and he who ministers to the one can not but influence the other to some 

 extent. While the priest has abundant opportunity for helping to 

 heal soul-injuries, his larger work, like that of the physician, lies in 

 surrounding those he would help with better social conditions, and in 

 developing, through religious and philosophic training, their individual 

 powers of resistance to the stresses to which the moral nature is daily 

 subjected. For both physical and spiritual ailments prevention is far 

 easier and better than cure. 



