Page:Faithhealingchri00buckiala.djvu/300

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286
"CHRISTIAN SCIENCE" AND "MIND CURE"

piety and intelligence of her pastor. He entered her room and in a loud and solemn voice said, "I command you to arise!" Involuntarily she arose and resumed the duties of housekeeping, which after the lapse of ten years she still performs.

A Roman Catholic priest, of high position in his church, told the writer that he thought he had saved scores of lives by refusing to administer the Sacrament of Extreme Unction, which led the patients to say "Father —— does not think I am going to die."

In 1832, when the cholera raged in Norfolk, Virginia, Dr. Buzzell, a physician of great local celebrity, lived there. He was driving night and day, and on one occasion was summoned to see a stalwart negro who was apparently in the state of collapse. Instead of beginning at once to treat him, he accused him of shamming, denounced and derided him in every possible way for calling him when he was at work night and day, driven almost to death. Then, assuming the appearance of intense excitement, he procured a switch and began to thrash the negro very severely. The more he groaned, and the more he said he was dying, the more Dr. Buzzell thrashed him, and with his threatenings and beatings brought on such a tremendous reaction that the man recovered.

In a visit to a branch of the Oneida Community at Wallingford, in 1856, I asked Mrs. Miller, the sister of John H. Noyes, the founder of the community, what they did if any of the inmates became ill, as they repudiated medicines. She said they had very little sickness. "But, have I not heard of an epidemic of diphtheria among you?" She said there had been, but by their treatment they saved every case. "What was that treatment?" "It was treatment by criticism." "How was it applied?" "So soon as a person was taken ill, a committee was appointed who went into