which prides itself on its scientific advances,
towards whom the rest of the world looks for guidance in scientific
discoveries and practices!

To have retarded the growth of medicine for the past 2000 years! Think
of the strides made in medicine in the past hundred years, and dwell on
the comfort humanity derives from it, in contrast to the filth, misery,
and pestilences of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
Would so much progress have been possible had man still persisted in the
belief that disease was due to demoniac intervention, and that the sum
total of all knowledge humanly possible was contained in the Bible?

It is no longer necessary for children to choke to death with
diphtheria. Yellow fever, and small pox in civilized countries are, or
could be, wiped from the face of the earth. Malaria is controlled;
tuberculosis will shortly be a rarity; typhoid fever and cholera have
been eradicated wherever there is sanitation; erysipelas can be
controlled; hydrophobia prevented; childbirth fever has lost its
tremendous mortality; tetanus can be checked; syphilis and gonorrhea can
be controlled; diabetes and pernicious anemia can be controlled; surgery
is reclaiming vast multitudes and restoring to useful and happy lives
thousands who would have hitherto died. So much has been done; but it is
especially true that there is as much, at least, yet to be done. But all
this has been achieved so recently. What might not have been won had not
the minds of men been polluted from infancy, warped by the first
professional holy men, the religionists, the priests? Had the idea of a
supernatural force been allowed to die in the Dark Ages, as it surely
would have, as man's mind expanded and developed, humanity would today
find itself more advanced on the road to progress. But as it was, the
myth of religion was foisted on the superstitious brain, and man
resigned himself to his fate, and lived in such a manner as to please
this hypothetical supernatural being. The inevitable result was the
abject misery, both material and spiritual, of Europe during the period
when the Church was in absolute control.

If this myth and mystification had died with the dead ages, as it should
have done, what a fitter place to live in this world would be today!
Consider the needless misery and the agony of those who died of the
various plagues; and think of the advanced stage of medicine of
Alexandria, three hundred years before the C