SPIRITUAL HEALING

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LVI, Issue 39, 17 May 1935, Page 2

SPIRITUAL HEALING

DISPUTE WITH MEDICAL

SCIENCE.

(From the Guardian's Special Correspondent—By Air Mail). LONDON, April 27. The Rev. John Maillard, whose spiritual healing services at Brighton have aroused national interest, declares that medical hostility to his work is causing him considerable difficulty. Medical men, who resent any encroachment by religion on what they consider their vested interests as the curers of humanity's ills, have, he says, put every possible obstacle in the way of his endeavour to follow up his cases with a view to ( checking the results of his prayer services. "I have had this difficulty again and again," he says. "One case was that of a sick man in hospital whose son appealed to me. We held prayers and the man was immediately benefited. But, when reporters approached the hospital, the doctors denied the improvement. They said the man was in a precarious condition and might not live. I wrote to the son, pointing out how essential it was to be absolutely honest in our statements of results. The son replied that the hospital had been beseiged by reporters, and he supposed the doctors were annoyed. Then he came to see me, and said that his father was better and was being discharged from hospital at the end of the week.

"This conflict between science and religion is not -new. There has been a pitched battle between them for centuries. Science has disputed again and again the healing claims of. religion, particularly in .cases of organic disease and other • infirmities which, are not amenable to material healing or suggestion. When religion does achieve what medical science considers impossible, the reply of science is always the same: 'There must have been a wrong diagnosis.' The fact is that none of us like to admit that others have succeeded where we have failed. Least of all will it be easy for science to make such an admission."