CHRISTIAN SCIENTISTS are sometimes asked this question: How do you know you were healed of a certain disease through the application of Christian Science, when you were not able to diagnose your own case and could not be sure that you had a given malady?
From a strictly materiel medica standpoint this query might on its face appear to carry some weight, as all diagnoses so called are based on the theory that certain physical symptoms indicate particular ailments; but even from this assumption as a working basis for tabulating diseases and codifying the material laws supposed to govern such cases, it is an incontrovertible fact that a very large proportion of all those who come to Christian Science for help have either been labeled with asserted diseases by the diagnoses of physicians, or they think they have this ailment or that, through the law of association. It is little cause for surprise, therefore, when a patient has been healed in Christian Science of a so-called diagnosed disease, that he should be only too glad to speak of it, and that Christian Science should very properly get the credit for the cure.
What is a medical diagnosis? It is a dictum respecting the classification of diseases based on the study of symptoms; it is a grouping or classifying of certain supposedly well defined physical manifestations of derangement in the body, which from long continued and minute observation have been specifically named. Just how far back this systematized taking of observations began, or the processes which have gradually led up through the years to the present complex workings of the modern diagnostician, is not so important as a knowledge of the fact that this medical fallacy exists, and that it has become so completely a part of present-day medical assumption as to have inoculated not only the patient and the apothecary, but all who are under the mesmeric spell of this material sense of things.
