This appeal to religious faith is, however, but one of our means of reaching nervous invalids; it is not always the most promising, nor is it always applicable; but it is the only one which affords any excuse for the entrance of the church into the fields of psychotherapy.
If, as has been said by one of its stoutest medical defenders, the aim of the Emmanuel Church work is only “to educate the religious faith, and to train the moral capacities of nervous invalids, sent to it by the physicians of the community for that very purpose,” there would be much less room for criticism. The work would then be done in the same quiet, unobtrusive way that the medical profession believes that all such work should be done.
But when it comes to lecturing weekly, to hundreds of laymen and women at the church, and to going about from city to city explaining to lay audiences the nature of the work and encouraging imitation, as is being done by the projectors of this Emmanual idea, the medical profession at large views with alarm the superficial manner in which a complex medical problem is presented, and sees in it strong elements of quackery and charlatanism, and the danger of great harm from its practise.
Education of the reason and strengthening of the will would seem to be more promising means of securing a nervous equilibrium than an appeal to the emotions. Even though this work has been, and is being done by the general practitioner, as we have already seen, it is probably true that in many cases, at least, it is a work in which he would welcome the assistance and advice of a specialist. But how much better fitted to give that help is the expert in diseases of the brain and nervous system who has studied psychology, than he who has studied psychology alone, or taken it up as a side issue to his study of theology and of church administration.
On this point there would seem to be little chance for disagreement. The safest counselor in all medical matters is he who has first grounded himself in normal and abnormal anatomy, in normal and pathological physiology and in the theory and practise of medicine as a whole, and then upon this foundation has made a thorough and exhaustive study of his special department; not the man who has followed a post-graduate course of lectures for a few weeks, or even months, nor the man whose psychological study has been incidental to his ecclesiastical training.
To quote again from the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal:
The only knowledge which is of value in the field of abnormal psychology and mental therapeutics has been gained from the laborious investigations of psychologists and physicians. This, all are free to use; but that its use is best safeguarded, and likely to be productive of the best results, in the hands of men with a general medical training will not generally be denied.
