The leaders of thought and practice in the medical profession have long known and acknowledged the limits of their science. They have not been ignorant of the fact of the large mental element in the cause and cure of disease. The placing of hypnotic and suggestive therapeutics upon a scientific basis has been almost if not wholly the work of practical physicians. It is not by accident that the foremost authority in psychiatry -- Kraepelin -- combines in one person the best of training in psychological theory with a thorough knowledge of and practice in medicine, or that the French investigators who seem to be well on the way to the discovery of the real relation of the mind to the body combine in rare proportions these same qualifications. So, too, the minister who would follow in the footsteps of Dr. Worcester must have, as he has, a thorough grounding in psychology as well as practical theological and religious training. No merely formal theology, no smattering of popularized psychology will suffice to make him successful or keep him from fatal errors.
There can be little doubt that the failure of the rank and file of the medical profession to live fully up to their opportunities in the field of psychotherapeutics is in part accountable for the rise and spread of a type of healing cult which reflects little credit upon the intelligence of our people, but which has been a natural result of a new evaluation of the mental element in man brought about largely by the popularization of psychological thought. The church has been equally negligent of her duty as a moral and spiritual force working in harmony and in cooperation with the physician for all-round health.
We desire to make the strongest possible appeal for a closer and more sympathetic relation between the sciences of medicine and psychology, and the practical, social, and spiritual forces of the church, each deferring to the other in its distinctive field, but all working together with mutual understanding to the common end of physical, moral, and spiritual health.
Only in some such utopian scheme can superstition be uprooted, religion purified and restored to its own, the science of medicine kept from becoming too materialistic and so powerless in some cases and to a degree crippled in all ; only by some such plan can the science of psychology be rescued from the danger of too much theorizing and put to work as the practical handmaid of all the other sciences of man.
Miracles of Healing
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By Charles W. Waddle (1909)
Primitive Christian Worship
Hereditary genius
