Civics and HealthAllen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Science
Civics and Health
Allen, William H. (WIlliam Harvey)
Hygiene; Public health
Many alcoholics have for months given evidences of complete cure.
Stories almost incredible are quickening pastor and physician alike
throughout the country. After individual treatments are given, after
religious motive is appealed to, and the soul stirred to heed the
lessons of religion, medicine, and sociology, patients are given the
work cure. Thus a branch of social service is established, where
after-treatment is given to the patient whose thoughts have been turned
from himself to others. All of a sudden the church finds itself in need
of definite knowledge as to opportunities for altruistic work, as to
definite community needs not met, as to people in distress who can be
relieved by volunteers, as to agencies which can be called upon to
cooeperate both in treating the individual and in utilizing his energies
for others' benefits.
Because a relatively small percentage of men and women are
neurasthenic, melancholy, morbid, alcoholic, the lesson of the moral
clinic is most serviceable when extended for the benefit of the "not
yet alcoholic" and the "not quite neurasthenic." In other words,
individuals in thinking of themselves must learn the health value and
soul value of purpose that centers in others' happiness. That thing
which we have called tact in personality, and which in the past was
discovered by induction, namely, the law of mental hygiene and the
control it gives over others' health, must be taught in schools to
children by wholesale, must be taught in medical and theological
schools, to all physicians and all pastors. This alliance of medicine
and religion, which is at present confined to one or two moral clinics,
should be incorporated into education, into social work, into church
work, becoming thus a part of civilization's normal point of view.
Mental hygiene cannot survive conscious violation of the fundamental
laws of medicine and religion. The alliance of medicine and religion
will prove utterly futile unless habits of living and of thinking are
inculcated that conform to nature's law of self-preservation and to
God's law of brotherly love. Self-centered religion, like self-centered
medicine, destroys both body and soul.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] The alliance of mental hygiene, medicine, and religion is discussed
in the Emmanuel Church book, _Religion and Medicine; the Moral Control
of Nervous Disorders_; also in its bulletins, _Religion and Medicine_.
CHAPTER XLI
"A NATURAL LAW IS AS SACRED AS A MORAL PRINCIPLE"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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