About fifteen years ago our family physician had made arrangements for the removal of tonsils from two of our children and myself. This seemed necessary, as the children had continuous sore throat, and one of them had eye trouble to the extent that a noted eye specialist had told us that the eyes would never be right until the tonsils were removed. A quinsy sore throat had attached itself to me for three successive winters, and all predictions were for a continuance for at least four years more.
The day before the operation was to take place, I called over the fence to my Christian Science neighbor, to the effect that I supposed she would consider it foolish for us to go to the hospital. She replied calmly, "Not foolish, perhaps, but unnecessary." As a result of this arresting statement, and some consequent remarks, the family physician was called, and he agreed that it would be very interesting to see the experiment tried, saying that we could resume the hospital idea in the fall if Science did not work. He very kindly canceled the hospital arrangements, even to the special nurse and surgeon for whom we had waited for over a month. Furthermore, he sent us to a practitioner to whom he had sent other cases with excellent results.
Treatment was begun for the two children. I thought that I would wait and see how it worked on them. At first the children's symptoms seemed much aggravated. The boy had to be taken out of school, his eyes were so bad. Had it not been for the physician, who came from time to time to see how we were getting along, we should have been tempted to stop treatment. He urged us to give it as fair a trial as we had given him and to do as the practitioner asked.
