Orthodox Medicine and Healing

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"Your long Latin words are unable to cure This sickening sadness I have to endure So from my sorrow one thing is sure; Doctors, your learning is simply absurd."
- (Moliere)

it was in ihe middle of the 19th century that science began stumblingly and slowly to approach an explanation for the occurrence of disease, and to effectively begin to thwart it. Medical treatment became constantly more effective. During the last twenty years breathtaking strides have taken place. The infant mortality rate has dropped, antibiotics cure once lethal diseases with exciting adroitness. Surgery has advanced to a startling degree. People are living longer and welcome a more easeful old age.

Our maturing comprehension of the workings of the human body, and of the troubles that harry it, give optimism that one by one the ailments that hurt it will cede to scientific medicine. Yet despite all this, gigantic areas remain where our medical knowledge remains skeletal. Patients still yield to strange contagions, to tumours and to premature failure of vital organs, when neither drugs nor surgery are effectual.

It is at times like these that people, confronted with the diagnosis of an inoperable tumour or a debilitating disease of the nervous system, such as disseminated sclerosis, decide to turn elsewhere for an answer. They may turn to faith healing, to quack remedies or pilgrimages to religious shrines.

As far as one can tell from the available evidence, these actions are essayed as a last resort, and usually achieve no more than a fleeting and short-lived lift of the spirits, or the consolation of religious faith in the face of the unfair.

Yet occasionally cures do occur that correspond with the sufferer's call to a shrine or a faith healer. There is much written evidence to this effect, which suggests that these sudden and dramatic cures are not quackery but evidence of some healing power as yet unexplained by medical science. Some of these cures are even backed up by medical evidence from qualified doctors.

For both the church and the medical profession, healing is the mad woman in the attic, the close relative that they would prefer not to talk about. But so-called 'orthodox' medicine (note the connotations of this term) is a fleeting parvenu when compared to the longevity of healing. Faith healing held sway for a full 18 centuries, from the time before Christ when the oracle at Delphi accepted the healing powers of Asciepius up to the Renaissance and beyond to the present. It is highly likely that healing is as old as mankind itself.

Beyond the Graeco-Roman world, belief in healing cures was even more common. The Persians considered the spell the most valid and trustworthy form of treatment. We should also consider the Indie culture of the East in our study. At the time from 100 to 1000 BC, the time of the Buddha and the Krishna, we find claims for magical cures alongside the use of herbal remedies.

In this philosophy the prana, or 'life force', of yoga is equated with the healing force. Indian texts tell how this energy can be transferred by touch and through the mind for therapeutic purposes. Reports are also given of the chakras, the circular energy fields by which energy flows from the etheric to the physical body.

The sphere of orthodox medicine has at its foundation figures such as Empodocles, Hippocrates, Paracelsus, Galen (who took the cure at Pergamum, the temple erected in honour of a healing cult) and Robert Boyle (the father of modern chemistry). These were figures who were willing to attach credence to the so-called 'forgotten art'. Were all these people duped? Or were they open to something we are wilfully blind to? The symbol of medicine itself, the snake, is a symbol that arose from a story connected to Asciepius, the Greek god of healing.

The career of the faith healer follows an archetypal pattern. After a halting and tentative beginning, the healer will begin to build up a following. His or her popularity spreads and then reaches its critical mass, where he or she becomes important enough to be seen as a potential threat, as a rival power bloc, to the monopoly of the church or the medical establishment.

Often the healer will have a powerful patron, but this is not enough to prevent either the physical or psychological destruction meted out to them. It is often forgotten that faith healers themselves are as much in need of positive reinforcement as their patients. A prosaic explanation will be produced by the orthodoxy in an attempt to besmirch and undermine the healer. The healer retires into seclusion, if he or she is lucky. If unlucky, he or she may end up in prison.

Sounds familiar? It should, because this is the story of virtually all faith healers, from Greatrakes to Jacob, from Rasputin to Arigo. This is a story that will be repeated until medicine begins to accept the sphere of faith healing as a legitimate branch of medicine. In the pantheon of faith healing since the 13th century this pattern is endlessly repeated.

Older (and wiser?) traditions extolled the healer as a functionary worthy of respect. In the case of Asciepius, the healer was a god. Yet now in America non-medical treatment is illegal in every state. How did such a fall-ing-off occur? We have seen how the church itself contributed to the marginalization of faith healing, now it is time to call orthodox medicine to the dock.

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