e omnipotent.

While the clergy maintain that a cure is only effected by God's will,
the physician knows otherwise. The physician accomplishes his cures
alone, and definitely cures and saves the lives of human beings by his
own skill, intelligence, and application of methods which have been
developed by the exercise of secular knowledge, not theological
nonsense. When man is so unfortunate as to contract an infection of the
appendix, and that inflammation succeeds to pus-formation so that this
diseased and non-essential part of the human anatomy is on the point of
rupturing and causing a fatal peritonitis, it is not by God's will and
intervention that a cure is effected, but by the intervention of the
surgeon who removes the diseased part. If man depended upon God's will
to save him, as he did in the past, the appendix would rupture,
peritonitis would set in, and despite prayers and sacrificial offerings,
the Deity would exact his life.

When an innocent infant, in the first few weeks of life, develops an
intussusception (an infolding of the bowel which causes an acute
obstruction), the prayers and supplication of the parents avail not a
particle; if the surgeon did not save the infant's life by operating and
removing the obstruction, the benevolent being would allow the child to
die.

The adult who develops a hernia, which is due to a defect in the
construction of the human body, which is assigned to an omniscient being
who still persists in forming bodies that are defective, and this hernia
becomes strangulated (twisted), the deity sits calmly by in omnipotent
inaction, while the prompt interference of the surgeon saves the
individual's life.

When the surgeon observes a superficial cancerous growth, or an internal
growth which can be removed in its entirety, does he trust to the Lord
to halt this pernicious development? No, the surgeon does not consult
God, but resorts to his own knowledge and skill to save a human life.

The diphtheritic child who is strangling to death with a diphtheritic
membrane in its throat is not permitted by the physician to be left to
the benevolent being's will, nor to the prayers of the parents. The
physician's prayer is the diphtheria antitoxin, which in his hands is
the life-saving device.

When the physician administers quinine for malaria, or salvarsan for
syphilis, he effects cures for these diseases by using agents to which
the clergy strenuously objected when they were first