Medicine: Prayer & Pills

Last week the doctors made news by asking the churchmen for a diagnosis. Chicago's huge Medical Center*(3,500 students) held a five-day meeting of doctors and ministers.

For the doctors, famed Physiologist Andrew Conway Ivy, who is also vice president of the University of Illinois, sounded the keynote. Said he: "Medicine is the handmaiden of science and religion. Religious and spiritual realms overlap more with the healing arts and sciences than in anything else man does. Try as we might to separate them, we can't do it, because that is the way we are built."

Having been asked for advice, the ministers spoke frankly. Said Missionary E. Stanley Jones: "A doctor must train . . . spiritually as well as physically . . . Fifty percent of sick persons need prayer more than pills, aspiration more than aspirin, meditation more than medication."

The bluntest words to the medicos came from Dr. Herbert Ratner, head of the Student Health Service at Loyola University School of Medicine. Dr. Ratner, a Jew converted to Roman Catholicism nine years ago, accused modern medical schools of sinking to a "veterinarian level by studying man as if he were a horse instead of a human being with a spirit . . . We see nature as violated, when modern man as the result of medical propaganda goes through life fearing death [and] ends up as a vitamin-taking, antacid-consuming, barbiturate-sedated, aspirin-alleviated, weed-habituated, benzedrine-stimulated, psychosomatically-diseased, surgically-despoiled animal."