The Religious Outlook

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 26 June 1943, Page 6

The Religious Outlook

THE BIBLE AND THE DOCTORS

On more than one occasion the Bible has been the means of bringing about, through “non-religious” channels, some great medical or social step forward in human progress. The whole world benefited by the hygienic laws perpetuated by the Jews and learned of them from the books of Moses. The Code Napoleon, one of the finest systems of legislature in existence, owes its origin largely to the same source.

When the greatest of medical men were seacrching for the cause of plague, it was the Bible which finally put them on the right track, as they now freely acknowledge. Bubonic plague, “the Black Death,” ravaged London in the seventeenth century and men said that dogs had spread it and ordered their destruction. (Had they but known it, killing dogs made matters worse!) Modern doctors who were engaged in research work after outbreaks of the plague in India and in China during modern times sought for the true remedy. Then one of them happened to read the Bible and noted that mice and rats were declared to be unclean animals. Mice and rats! Doctors knew that the rodents flourished in plague •areas- Experiments were carried out. Guinea pigs were confined in cages where rodents had been, and though no rodent touched them, they died of plague. The greatest medical minds were puzzled. They knew rats and mice spread the plague, but how? Then some one remembered the Bible word, written 4000 years before the dawn of modern medical science. Mice and rats were “unclean”—why unclean? Rats were examined again and the riddle was solved. Fleas carried the plague from rats to human beings. Once proved, the discovery helped to practically stamp out the plague. This incident, though one of the most notable, is not the only one where the Bible put scientists on the right track. Edward G. Acheson, who made a large fortune from the marketing of a new type of lubricant, was reading the Bible story of the children of Israel’s difficulty in making bricks without straw, when he asked himself the question: “Why the difficulty? What is there in straw which is needful to brick-making?” He analysed straw and found in it the chemical tannin. He applied the discovery to his own field of labour and found that by adding tannin to oils he could make graphite, which has valuable lubricating properties remaining in suspension, whereas without the tannin the graphite forms into granules unevenly dispersed throughout the lubricant.