SEVEN years ago last November (1910) I was completely healed of acute lung trouble, neuralgia, and rheumatism, through the operation of Christian Science. I was also freed at the same time from the liquor and tobacco habits. For a number of years prior to my healing I had suffered attacks of lung trouble, often complicated with other ills. I had tried various material remedies, and had been treated by physicians of different schools of medicine, but all to no purpose. My last physician told me that the Chicago winters were too severe for me, and that I must seek a milder climate. In my extremity I turned to Christian Science, and was completely healed. Since then I have suffered no inconvenience from cold weather in Chicago, and do not think that in all that time I have lost one day from my business on this account.
But what has always seemed to me to be the most wonderful part of my healing, was the entire recovery of the use of my right arm and shoulder. Forty-seven years ago, on the twenty-first of July, during a battle in front of Atlanta, Georgia, I was shot through the right shoulder with a Minie ball. My shoulder was thrown out of joint, the bone between the shoulder and elbow was splintered as the ball passed through. For sixteen years after receiving this wound I suffered greatly from it. The loosened bones caused me much pain, and when the openings in the wound closed up it was necessary to have them reopened. During the sixteen years I had fourteen operations of this kind performed and seventeen pieces of bone removed.
The physicians who attended me were greatly puzzled over the case. Finally three army surgeons came to my house, and after cutting and probing diagnosed the case as diseased bone,—I think they called it caries of the bone,—and told my wife that there was danger of poisoning and that the entire bone between the shoulder and elbow should be removed; but this my wife refused to have done. After sixteen years all of the splintered bone had worked out, and the different openings were healed over, but up to the time that I was healed in Christian Science of pneumonia, and other ills, I had to be assisted in dressing, had a flanne-llined chamois skin padding to cover my arm and shoulder in cold weather, and was in constant fear that if great care were not taken the wounds would break out again.
