While most people in the developed world may think about communicable illness only during certain times of the year, around the globe contagious diseases—more than just seasonal inconveniences—rank as one of the biggest challenges to health and life-expectancy. Whether in regard to malaria, yellow fever, HIV/AIDS, or other illnesses, the need for healing is great.
Beyond the coming and going of particular infectious diseases, Christian Science offers the opportunity to view all contagion through the understanding of God as pure goodness, and of each of us as the continuously cared for child of God.
A passage from Robert Peel’s biography of Mary Baker Eddy sheds light: “Seen from the vantage point of Mrs. Eddy’s mature teachings, her mental probings in the summer of 1880 might be compared to some of the medical researches then taking place. That was the period in which each year saw the discovery of some new microbe—malaria, cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria—and in which Pasteur advanced the principle of immunization through vaccination. The whole world was becoming germ conscious. Those microscopic bacteria were taking on the fearsomeness of the traditional dragon and sea serpent; indeed, the electron microscope of 75 years later, capable of enlargements 300,000 times life size, might suggest that in a molecular world even a virus could qualify as a dragon.
