DOCTOR AND PRIEST

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXXIII, Issue 4806, 5 July 1939, Page 3

DOCTOR AND PRIEST

COLLABORATION URGED. Discussing the interrelation of body and spirit in a recent address, Canon Harold Anson, Master of the Temple, quoted a saying of Dr. Rivers, “perhaps our greatest English medical psychologist,’ as follows:—It is a question whether increasing specialisation is characteristic of evolution throughout, or whether it is not rather a necessary feature —I should like to call it a necessary evil feature — of the middle stages of evolution. If medicine is to hold its own in certain aspects of disease which should come properly within its sphere, it must find that it has much to learn from the priest, if, indeed, some kind of collaboration between the two is not desirable. No treatment of the subject of mind and medicine would be complete which excludes religion. One of the most striking results of the modern development of our knowledge concerning the influence of mental factors in disease is that they are bringng back medicine in some measure to that co-operation with religion which existed in the early stages of human progress.