Medicine has advanced
through its disassociation with supernaturalism, while religion still
remains the last refuge of human savagery.

And so it had been that throughout those long, sterile, and barbarous
ages primitive man ascribed all diseases either to the wrath of God, or
the malice of an Evil Being. With the rise of the Greek philosophers,
the human mind for the first time began to throw off the fogs of
superstition. In Greece, 500 years before Christ, Hippocrates developed
scientific thought and laid the foundations of medical science upon
observation, experience, and reason. Under his guidance, medicine for
the first time was separated from religion. He relieved the gods of the
responsibility for disease and placed it squarely upon the shoulders of
man. His findings were passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there
medical science was further developed. At this stage of history all
advances stopped, and for the following reason:

With the coming of Christianity this science, as well as all others, was
stultified. A retrogression took place to the ideation of the most
primitive of men, namely, the conception of physical disease as the
result of the wrath of God, or the malice of Satan, or by a combination
of both. The Old Testament attributes such diseases as the leprosy of
Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram, the
withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many other
ills, to the wrath of God, or the malice of Satan. The New Testament
furnishes such examples as the woman "bound by Satan," the rebuke of
the fever, the casting out of the devil which was dumb, the healing of
persons whom "the devil oftimes casteth into the fire," and various
other episodes. Christian theology then evolved theories of miraculous
methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the divine anger, or of
thwarting satanic malice. The curing of disease by the casting out of
devils, by prayers, were the means of relief from sickness recognized
and commanded by the Bible. Thus Christianity perverted the beginning of
a science of medicine to a system of attempted cure of disease by fraud.

The treatment of disease descended to the cures found in holy and
healing wells, pools, and streams; in miracles and the efficacy that was
to be found in the relics of saints. Instead of reliance upon
observation, experience, and thought, attention was directed toward
supernatural agencies. In contrast to the Gr