From Hippocrates to our times medical practitioners have looked for and continue to look for the causes and cure of diseases. Today, psychosomatic factors—the influence of thought on the body—are more generally taken into account. For example, a French doctor is reported to have described disease, a couple of years ago, as an intellectual construction—the result of a knowledge for which the body becomes the blackboard.
Medical theory regards man as a biological machine and approaches healing in a material way. Christian Science— the Science of Christ—approaches healing in a scientifically spiritual way. This Science reveals that God is the divine Principle of all that is real, and it shows how God's infinite goodness can be demonstrated in every phase of life—for protection from disease as well as for healing—through the understanding of the divine law rather than through faith in materiality.
I recently read in a Paris daily newspaper that the medicine of the twenty-first century would be prophylaxis. In order to consistently and effectively prevent disease one must abandon the belief in the possibility of its existence, abandon the belief in heredity, contagion, fatigue, the belief of life in matter. Not allowing such beliefs to take root in our thought, refusing to accept their claim to govern us, and affirming that there is only one Truth give us dominion over these beliefs and prevent inharmonious bodily manifestations. The material senses do not give us the true image of man. Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "To prevent disease or to cure it, the power of Truth, of divine Spirit, must break the dream of the material senses." Science and Health, p. 412;
