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. 
