[The following article, in the form of a letter, was written by R. Sears, M.D., and published in the Times-Republican, at Marshalltown, Iowa, October 16, in a department called Public Hopper. Though the writer is not a Scientist, in our sense of that term, and his statements are therefore not wholly accurate, yet they are worth printing entire.]
In a recent issue you published a letter from Mrs. Nettie Anderson, making a plea for Christian Science, and a few days later a reply to it by one Wendel, of Dows, Iowa, denouncing this "new method" of treating disease as an "offshoot of defunct witchcraft," offering to bet from five-hundred to one-thousand dollars that "no case of real disease was ever cured by it, and that all those who profess to heal by it are "impious wizards and charlatans," who seek to "decoy their victims." This reply is so in keeping with the general tenor of articles published, that I desire to give my own experience in Christian Science.
I am by profession an allopathic physician. I graduated from Rush Medical College in 1854, and practised medicine actively in Central Iowa for nearly thirty years. I have belonged to the Iowa State Medical Society since the first year of its organization. I have been one of the most ultra sticklers for the old methods of practice, denouncing all the outside schools of medicine in the strongest terms, and honestly regarded all healers by magnetism, and the various other isms, as quacks and humbugs who ought to be suppressed. My observations since I have been out of practice have led me to somewhat modify my views as to some methods.
