In Christian Science on Trial, historian Rennie B. Schoepflin shows how Christian The ambivalence of many Americans about the practice of religious healing Rennie B. Schoepflin, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at La Sierra of how this unusual, but enduring, form of medicine and religion developed.
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Christian Science on Trial
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San Diego State University. Article PDF first page preview. The limited authority of the medical community becomes even clearer through Schoepflin's examination of the pitched battles fought by physicians and Christian Scientists in America's courtrooms and legislative halls over the legality of Christian Science healing. While the issues of medical licensing, the meaning of medical practice, and the supposed right of Americans to therapeutic choice dominated early debates, later confrontations saw the legal issues shift to matters of contagious disease, public safety, and children's rights.
Throughout, Christian Scientists revealed their ambiguous status as medical practitioners and religious healers. The s witnessed an unsteady truce between American medicine and Christian Science.
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The ambivalence of many Americans about the practice of religious healing persisted, however. Sponsored Products are advertisements for products sold by merchants on Amazon. When you click on a Sponsored Product ad, you will be taken to an Amazon detail page where you can learn more about the product and purchase it. To learn more about Amazon Sponsored Products, click here. This book is not so much a critical assessment of Christian Science as it is a densely researched narrative of how this unusual, but enduring, form of medicine and religion developed.
Through detailed accounts of testimony given in various legal proceedings, Schoepflin captures -- often in their own words -- the flavor of exchanges between Christian Scientists and those in the emerging establishment of allopathic medicine.
Christian Science on Trial
He traces with intriguing clarity how Mary Baker Eddy Figure discovered "Science," promulgated its "Truth," made a prosperous living practicing her form of "medicine," and eventually founded a countercultural religious movement to liberate humanity from the "errors of thought" that are manifested as physical disease. At the same time, Mary Baker Eddy's story is woven into the larger narrative of how allopathic medicine emerged from the 19th century as the dominant paradigm for health care.
Schoepflin suggests that its success had as much to do with skillful rhetoric as with randomized controlled trials. Modern medicine was still in its infancy, and the scientific method was largely an untested hypothesis. The pitched battles between proponents of Christian Science and of allopathic medicine did not focus on data, but on who controlled the language that framed the issues. Both systems of practice were struggling for legitimization, and as with most of history, the community that controls the story controls the power. For the believer in Christian Science, the mind is the only reality and material existence is an illusion.
Therefore, any physical illness is an illusion of the mind. But Schoepflin describes not only what Scientists professed, but also how they actually lived and thought. In so doing, he gives the reader a remarkably unbiased and vivid account, and by unfolding parts of the story from the perspective of the Scientists themselves, Schoepflin short-circuits the often reflexive dismissal of this radically spiritualized worldview.
The reader may discover unexpected respect for the strange, but frequently coherent, arguments of the Scientists.
Despite its fresh historical detail, the story might have been more compelling if Schoepflin had spent more time examining why, after a year detente, Christian Science has suffered increasingly frequent attacks since the s. Schoepflin's first chapter provocatively observes that the contemporary interest in mind-body medicine and spiritual healing takes place in a climate startlingly similar to the historical climate that gave birth to Christian Science in the midth century.
Yet he never speculates on why these two time periods are so similar. Schoepflin's interpretation exposes how the responses of physicians and clergy were often calculated to maintain their own privilege and power in the face of a Scientist threat, but although this view is compelling for the 19th-century context, it is unlikely that the contemporary medical establishment is threatened by mind-body medicine in anything like the way it was a century ago. The current debates probably revolve around the philosophical and theological problems with radically spiritualized worldviews that deny the reality of material existence.
If the materialism of modern medicine tends to neglect the soul in order to cure the body, the spiritualized alternative medicine proposed by modern physicians such as Andrew Weil and Larry Dossey may, like the Scientists, neglect the body to cure the soul. In Christian Science on Trial we gain a helpful historical context for understanding late--twentieth-century public debates over children's rights, parental responsibility, and the authority of modern medicine.
Christian Scientists did not simply evangelize for their religious beliefs; they engaged in a healing business that offered a Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America.
- Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America - Rennie B. Schoepflin - Google Книги.
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