Faith Healing
By BRIAN INGLIS
AN old parlour trick of amateur hypnotists is to touch a subject with an unlighted cigarette, tell- ing him that the cigarette is lit; he may squeal with pain and later grow a blister upon his skin. Conversely, if he is touched with a lighted cigarette and told that it is not lit, he may feel no pain and get no blister. Nobody now suggests, as once was thought, that this is dup to any occult Power on the part of the hypnotist. It is no more thari a simple demonstra- tion of the way that the unconscious mind can transmit instructions to the body, which the body obeys, even where they are inappropriate.
The mind's ability to command the body's obedience is naturally not unlimited; it is no use to a man about to be engulfed in an earthquake. Yet within certain limits, its powers are stagger- ing enough, as research during the last twenty years has shown. But research has not yet tied up this knowledge with what is known about faith healing (to use the term in its widest sense) in order to explore how far the recoveries which in the past have been thought of as miraculous, or supernatural, or simply incomprehensible, are really nothing more than the result of the removal of unconscious stresses (or whatever the trouble is)—their removal enabling the body to make its own recovery.
Much more research is obviously required; but in the meantime it is reasonable to argue that the present attitude of the medical profession to what are considered unorthodox forms of treat- ment—homeopathy and osteopathy as well as faith healing—is misguided. It is right that the public should be protected from quacks; what is not right is that the medical profession should continue to use its powers to prevent research along unorthodox, or what it thinks of as 'un- scientific,' lines, even when the prima facie case for such research is very strong.
The trouble is that the subject of healing is loaded with prejudices : we cannot begin to dis- cuss it dispassionately. Anybody who has been brought up a Protestant, for example, finds it hard lo keep his mind open, or even slightly ajar, about Lourdes. The name itself raises hackles —like 'Inquisition'; and there will be plenty of people who will read Dr. West's. compact but comprehensive demolition of the Lourdes miracles* with glee simply because the miracles are Catholic. Dr. West makes no pretence of having investigated the cases thoroughly; instead, he makes it one of his damning arguments that thorough investigation is impossible, so scanty is the evidence upon which the Church authorities were prepared to accept divine intervention. He takes the eleven modern cures which have passed the scrutiny of the Church's examining tribunals, examines the examinations and concludes : 'the majority are miraculous only in the sense that normal processes of cure appear to have been speeded up; in no case has a sudden structural change been confirmed by the objective evidence of X-rays.'
Dr. West's own limitations are revealed in this last suggestion : X-rays may be objective, but not the men who interpret them. X-ray interpre- tations are notoriously fallible. Still, his main point appears valid; that most 'miracles' consist of a speeding-up of normal healing processes; and however remarkable the change in tempo, it can be explained without the need to think in terms of divine intervention. Quacks can do it, too.
The extent to which quacks actually do work miracles is still, despite the efforts of the Sunday papers, little known to the public. Healers, as they call themselves—to distinguish themselves from doctors?—are of many kinds. Some, like the late William J. MacMillan, achieve comparative re- spectability through their social and clerical contacts; but the majority, like Mr. Jesse Thomas, are on the outside; and are likely to remain so, as long as the medical profession's current fad for the physical and the chemical explanation * ELEVEN LOURDES MIRACLES. (Duckworth, 15s.) lasts. True, the profession does occasionally sit in on tests of faith-healing—but usually in the hope of showing up the healer as a fake; if the healer has a success, Mr. Thomas complains, it is either ignored or explained away.
Neither Mr. Thomas nor Mr. MacMillan has been the kind of person who combines with healing powers the capacity to persuade people (except, of course, his patients) to take his powers seriously. Mr. MacMillan's Prelude to Healing* explains why. It is the life story of a self-centred and irritating man, mainly about his life before the power of healing came into it. Mr. Thomas's Psychic Surgeont is no less irritat- ing, but much more interesting. The author has found himself able to perform psychical opera- tions on the bodies of patients. Going into a trance, he mimics the actions of a surgeon per- forming an operation; and his patients, he claims, make the same sort of recovery as they would from an actual surgical operation.
Absurd though this may sound, there is nothing particularly odd about it; healing powers fre- quently manifest themselves in such ways. But the author, though he himself says it is 'dishonest' to try to explain how psychic cures are effected, makes some of the usual ludicrous attempts at explanation. To the question why his psychic operations are conducted above the patient's body, he explains : 'Your astral body lies about three inches over your physical ... after the operation the astral sinks into the physical, and the physical is healed'—a description nicely calculated to make the ordinary reader dismiss the book as bogus.
It is unfortunate that people who are healers are so often able to work only through the elaborate and often grotesque rituals charac- teristic of spiritualism. The capacity to transmit healing is something which is often connected with the most arrant mumbo-jumbo—or down- right charlatanism : but there is often a simple enough explanation. Patients may feel that a healer is cheating them, or pulling their legs, if he does not put on some sort of an act for them; and in time the gestures—mystic passes or what- ever they may be—may become as essential to the performance as `patter' is to a juggler. But this would not explain why healers who work in or through a state of trance may also have their act : presumably the unconscious mind has powers of mimicry of whose scope we are as yet only dimly aware. The apparent absurdity of the many forms which healing takes should not be a bar to a much more serious investigation than that which was recently carried out into divine healing by the BMA.
In a recent controversy in the British Medical Journal, a number of correspondents were courageous enough to suggest—to the horror of others—that the profession here has much to learn even from the witch-doctors of Africa, who have long used techniques—suggestion, abreac- tion and so on—which are now coming back into favour here. Psychiatrists and psychotherapists, therefore, can learn from the medicine-men. The way witch-doctoring methods work may not be understood—but then, neither is it understood how electric shock treatment works; and the fact that such methods may work better than `scien- tific' drugs and operations suggests that the pro- fession should no longer treat anybody with heal- ing gifts, but without a degree, as a rogue or a pariah.
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