Benediction For Doctors
2Ch_16:12-13 : ’93And Asa, in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.’94
At this season of the year, when medical colleges of all schools of medicine are giving diplomas to young doctors, and at the Capital and in many of the cities medical associations are assembling to consult about the advancement of the interests of their profession, I feel this discourse is appropriate.
In my text is King Asa, with the gout. High living and no exercise have vitiated his blood, and my text presents him with his inflamed and bandaged feet on an ottoman. He sends for certain conjurors or quacks. They come and give him all sorts of lotions and panaceas. They bleed him. They sweat him. They drug him. They cut him. They kill him. He was only a young man, and had a disease which, though very painful, seldom proves fatal to a young man, and he ought to have got well; but he fell a victim to charlatanry and empiricism. ’93And Asa, in the thirty and ninth year of his reign was diseased in his feet, until his disease was exceeding great: yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.’94 That is, the doctors killed him.
In this sharp and graphic way the Bible sets forth the truth, that you have no right; to shut God out from the realm of pharmacy and therapeutics. If Asa had said: ’93O Lord! I am sick! bless the instrumentality employed for my recovery! Now, servant, go and get the best doctor you can find’94’97he would have recovered. In other words, the world wants divinely directed physicians. There are a great many such. The diplomas they have received from the academies of medicine were nothing compared with the diploma they received from the Head Physician of the universe on the day when they started out and he said to them: ’93Go heal the sick and cast out the devils of pain and open the blind eyes and unstop the deaf ears.’94 God bless the doctors all the world over! And let all the hospitals and dispensaries and infirmaries and asylums and domestic circles of the earth respond: ’93Amen.’94
Men of the medical profession we often meet in the home of distress. We shake hands across the cradle of agonized infancy. We join each other in an attempt at solace where the paroxysm of grief demands an anodyne as well as a prayer. We look into each other’92s sympathetic faces through the dusk, as the night of death is falling in the sickroom. We do not have to climb over any barrier today in order to greet each other, for our professions are in full sympathy. You, doctor, are our first and last earthly friend. You stand at the gates of life when we enter this world, and you stand at the gates of death when we go out of it. At the close of our earthly existence, when the hand of the wife or mother or sister or daughter shall hold our right hand, it will give strength to our dying moment, if we can feel the tips of your fingers along the pulse of the left wrist. We do not meet today, as on other days, in houses of distress, but by the pleasant altars of God, and I propose a sermon of helpfulness and good cheer. As in the nursery children sometimes re-enact all the scenes of the sickroom, so today you play that you are the patient and that I am the physician, and take my prescription just once. It shall be a tonic, a sedative, a dietetic, a stimulus, and an anodyne at the same time. ’93Is there not balm in Gilead? Is there not a physician there?’94
In the first place, I think all the medical profession should become Christians because of the debt of gratitude they owe to God for the honor he has put upon their calling. No other calling in all the world, except it be that of the Christian ministry, has received so great an honor as yours. Christ himself was not only preacher, but physician, surgeon, aurist, ophthalmologist, and under his mighty power optic and auditory nerve thrilled with light and sound, and catalepsy arose from its fit, and the club-foot was straightened, and anchylosis went out of the stiffened tendons, and the foaming maniac became placid as a child, and the streets of Jerusalem became an extemporized hospital crowded with the convalescent victims of casualty and invalidism. All ages have woven the garland for the doctor’92s brow. Homer said:
A wise physician, skilled of wounds to heal,
Is more than armies to the public weal.
Cicero said: ’93There is nothing in which men so approach the gods as when they try to give health to other men.’94 Charles IX made proclamation that all the Protestants in France should be put to death on St. Bartholomew’92s Day, but made one exception, and that the case of Pare, the father of French surgery. The battlefields of the American Revolution welcomed Drs. Mercer and Warren and Rush. When the French army was entirely demoralized at fear of the plague, the leading surgeon of that army inoculated himself with the plague to show the soldiers there was no contagion in it; and their courage rose and they went on to the conflict. God has honored this profession all the way through. What advancement from the days when Hippocrates tried to cure the great Pericles with hellebore and flax-seed poultices down to far later centuries, when Haller propounded the theory of respiration and Harvey the circulation of the blood and Asceli the uses of the lymphatic vessels and Jenner balked the worst disease that ever scourged Europe and Sydenham developed the recuperative forces of the physical organism and cinchona bark stopped the shivering agues of the world and Sir Astley Cooper and Abernethy and Hosack and Romeyn and Griscom and Valentine Mott of the generation just past, honored God, and fought back death with their keen scalpels.
This profession has done wonders for public hygiene! How often they have stood between this nation and Asiatic cholera and the yellow fever! The monuments in Greenwood and Mount Auburn and Laurel Hill tell something of the story of those men who stood face to face with pestilence in Southern cities, until staggering in their own sickness they stumbled across the corpses of those whom they had come to save. This profession has been the successful advocate of ventilation, sewerage, drainage, and fumigation, until their sentiments were well expressed by Lord Palmerston, when he said to the English nation at the time a fast had been proclaimed to keep off a great pestilence: ’93Clean your streets or death will ravage, notwithstanding all the prayers of this nation. Clean your streets, and then call on God for help.’94
See what this profession has done for human longevity. There was such a fearful abstraction from human life that there was a prospect that within a few centuries this world would be left almost inhabitantless. Adam started with a whole eternity of earthly existence before him; but he cut off the most of it and only comparatively few years were left’97only seven hundred years of life, and then five hundred and then four hundred and then two hundred and then one hundred and then fifty and then the average of human life came to forty and then it dropped to fifteen. But medical science came in, and since the sixteenth century the average of human life has risen from fifteen to forty-four; and it will continue to rise until the average of human life will be fifty and it will be sixty and it will be seventy, and a man will have no right to die before ninety, and the prophecy of Isaiah will be literally fulfilled: ’93And the child shall die a hundred years old.’94 The millennium for the souls of men will be the millennium for the bodies of men. Sin done, disease will be done’97the clergyman and the physician getting through with their work at the same time.
But it seems to me that the most beautiful benediction of the medical profession has been dropped upon the poor. No excuse now for any one’92s not having scientific attendance. Dispensaries and infirmaries everywhere under the control of the best doctors, some of them poorly paid, some of them not paid at all. A half-starved woman comes out from the low tenement-house into the dispensary, and unwraps the rags from her babe, a bundle of ulcers and rheum and pustules, and over that little sufferer bends the cumulated wisdom of the ages, from Esculapius down to the last week’92s autopsy. In one dispensary, in one year, one hundred and fifty thousand prescriptions were issued.
Another reason why I think the medical profession ought to be Christians, is because there are so many trials and annoyances in that profession that need positive Christian solace. I know you nave the gratitude of a great many good people, and I know it must be a grand thing to walk intelligently through the avenues of human life, and with anatomic skill poise yourself on the nerves and fibers which cross and recross this wonderful physical system. I suppose a skilled eye can see more beauty even in malformation than an architect can point out in any of. his structures, though it be the very triumph of arch and plinth and abacus. But how many annoyances and trials the medical profession have. Dr. Rush used to say, in his valedictory address to the students of the medical college: ’93Young gentlemen, have two pockets’97a small pocket and a big pocket; a small pocket in which to put your fees, a large pocket in which to put your annoyances.’94 In the first place, the physician has no Sabbath. Busy merchants and lawyers and mechanics cannot afford to be sick during the secular week, and so they nurse themselves along with lozenges and horehound candy until Sabbath morning comes, and then they say: ’93I must have a doctor.’94 And that spoils the Sabbath morning church service for the physician. Beside that, there are a great many men who dine but once a week with their families. During the secular days they take a hasty lunch at the restaurant, and on the Sabbath they make up for their six days’92 abstinence by especial gormandizing, which before night makes their amazed digestive organs cry out for a doctor. And that spoils the evening church service for the physician. Then they are annoyed by people coming too late. Men wait until the last fortress of physical strength is taken, and death has dug around it the trench of the grave, and then they run for the doctor. The slight fever which might have been cured with a foot-bath, has become virulent typhus, and the hacking cough, killing pneumonia. As though a captain should sink his ship off Amagansett, and then put ashore in a yawl, and then come to New York to the marine office and want to get his vessel insured. Too late for the ship, too late for the patient.
Then there are many who always blame the doctor because the people die, forgetting the divine enactment: ’93It is appointed unto all men once to die.’94 How easy it is when people die, to cry out: ’93Malpractice.’94 Then the physician must bear with all the whims and the sophistries and the deceptions and the stratagems and the irritations of the shattered nerves and the beclouded brain of women, and more especially of men, who never know how gracefully to be sick. To keep up under this nervous strain, to go through this night-work, to bear all these annoyances, many physicians have resorted to strong drink or morphine and perished. Others have appealed to God for sympathy and help, and have lived. Which were the wise doctors, judge ye?
Again, the medical profession ought to be Christians because there are professional exigencies when they need God. Asa’92s destruction by unblessed physicians was a warning. There are awful crises in every medical practise, when a doctor ought to know how to pray. All the hosts of ills sometimes hurl themselves on the weak points of the physical organism, or with equal ferocity will assault the entire line of susceptibility to suffering. The next dose of medicine will decide whether or not the happy home shall be broken up. Shall it be this medicine or that medicine? God help the doctor. Between the five drops and the ten drops may be the question of life or death. Shall it be the five or the ten drops? Be careful how you put that knife through those delicate portions of the body, for if it swing out of the way the sixth part of an inch, the patient perishes. Under such circumstances a physician needs not so much consultation with men of his own calling, as he needs consultation with that God who strung the nerves and built the cells and swung the crimson tide through the arteries. I do not mean to say that piety will make up for medical skill. A bungling doctor, perplexed with what was not a very bad case, went into the next room to pray. A skilled physician was called in. He asked for the first practitioner. ’93Oh,’94 they said, ’93he is in the next room praying.’94 ’93Well,’94 said the skilled doctor, ’93tell him to come out here and help; he can pray and work at the same time.’94 It was all in that sentence. Do the best we can and ask God to help us. There are no two men in all the world, it seems to me, who so much need the grace of God as the minister who doctors the sick soul, and the physician who prescribes for the diseased body.
Another reason why the medical profession ought to be Christians, is because there opens before them such a grand field for Christian usefulness. You see so many people in pain, in trouble, in bereavement. You ought to be the voice of heaven to their souls. Old Dr. Gasherie De Witt, a practitioner of New York, told me in his last days: ’93I always present the religion of Christ to my patients, either directly or indirectly, and I find it is almost always acceptable.’94 Drs. Abercrombie and Brown, of Scotland; Drs. Hey and Fothergill, of England, and Dr. Rush, of our own country, were celebrated for their faithfulness in that direction. ’93Oh,’94 says the medical profession, ’93that is your occupation; that belongs to the clergy, not to us.’94 My brother, there are severe illnesses in which you will not admit even the clergy, and that patient’92s salvation will depend upon your faithfulness. With the medicine for the body in one hand, and the medicine for the soul in the other, oh, what a chance!
But I must close, for there may be suffering men and women waiting in your office, or on that hot pillow, wondering why you do not come. But before you go, O doctors! hear my prayer for your eternal salvation. Blessed will be the reward in heaven for the faithful Christian physician. Some day, through much overwork, or from bending over a patient and catching his contagious breath, the doctor comes home, and he lies down faint and sick. He is too weary to feel his own pulse or take the diagnosis of his own complaint. He is worn out. The fact is his work on earth is ended. Tell those people in the office there they need not wait any longer; the doctor will never go there again. He has written his last prescription for the alleviation of human pain. The people will run up his front steps and inquire: ’93How is the doctor today?’94 All the sympathies of the neighborhood will be aroused, and there will be many prayers that he who has been so kind to the sick may be comforted in his last pang. It is all over now. In two or three days, his convalescent patients, with shawls wrapped around them, will come to the front window and look out at the passing hearse, and the poor of the city, barefooted and bareheaded, will stand on the street corner, saying: ’93Oh, how good he was to us all!’94 But on the other side of the river of death some of his old patients, who are forever cured, will come out to welcome him, and the Physician of Heaven, with locks as white as snow, according to the apocalyptic vision, will come out and say: ’93Come in, come in. I was sick and ye visited me!’94
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage