Prof: Religion acts as medical force in medicine
By ANNE MARIE
MATTINGLY
The role of religion in the history of health and healing has largely been ignored by scholars, said Ron Numbers, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of science and medicine, in a lecture Thursday.
"Once upon a time, the healing of body and soul were intimately connected," he said, citing historical roles of ministers as persons who cared for the sick. "Today, when we think of medicine, we rarely think of religion."
Numbers noted that this common attitude is reflected in written works on the history of health.
"Religion has remained decidedly on the margins of the history of medicine," he said. "We scarcely find any evidence in the history of medicine that religion was an important factor."
But religion has been a major force in health care in America, explained Numbers, who noted that most of the nation's early hospitals were organized and run by religious groups. Protestant and Jewish hospitals appeared by 1888, and Catholic groups ran over 1,000 hospitals in the 1950s.
"One of the reasons we don't know more about the history of religion in hospitals is that [it's hard to get the facts]," said Numbers. "You can get bits and pieces, an occasional snapshot, but nobody — none of these organizations — has kept adequate records, so we can only guess."
From the mid-1870s to the mid-1920s, however, the number of hospitals increased from less than 200 to more than 6,000, and 40 percent of non-profit hospitals were church related, said Numbers. He also claimed that this proliferation was more a reflection of church prominence than necessity.
"Religious identity, rather than medical need, [was the reason to build a hospital]," he explained. "Often religious groups saw hospitals as a way of establishing a presence in a community."
Numbers also attributed the development of nursing to religious institutions. He claims that the common association of the modern nurse with Florence Nightengale reflects only the professionalization of nursing, not its creation as one tier of the medical care system.
"American nursing, too, owes much of its origins to religious roots," said Numbers. "The only experienced nurses to be found in the United States [during the Civil War] were Catholic nuns and Protestant deaconesses."
Numbers emphasized the religious basis of nursing by noting that Nightengale's organization was modeled after a religious group of nurses based in Germany and that a nun served as the first superintendent of the first professional nursing school.
In the 20th century, these ties of religious institutions to hospitals linger primarily in the religious names of hospitals, he said. Instead, the modern association of religious healing has consisted primarily of the concept of supernatural healing.
This tradition began around 1900 with the founding of the Pentecostal movement, and led to a debate between Catholics and Protestants of the validity of prayer for healing based upon the distinction between natural and supernatural healing. In more modern eras, believers in supernatural healing have promoted their views in large gatherings.
"No event before World War II compared with the massive healing revivals of the 1950s," said Numbers.
The debate is now dying out because many institutions now employ both modern medical techniques and prayer, said Numbers, who reported that 79 percent of Americans believe in the efficacy of intercessory prayer for healing.
Some double-blind studies have shown benefits of prayer to the Judeo-Christian god, and nearly half of American medical schools now offer courses in spirituality and healing.
Meanwhile, the major traditional religious groups have not ceased to have a hand in healing, but instead have changed their methods for influencing health.
One modern trend is for religious groups to sell their hospitals to for-profit organizations and to use the money gained to promote preventative care.
"It's not as though churches are getting out of the health care business," said Numbers. "They're just shifting their focus."
All News Stories for Friday, February 25, 2000
