Medical missions : an address to students introductory to a course of lectures on this subject undertaken by members of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society / by James Miller.

  • James Miller
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Medical missions : an address to students introductory to a course of lectures on this subject undertaken by members of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society / by James Miller. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    not only preached the gospel, but also “ healed all manner of disease.” The first missionaries to the Heathen were Paul and Barnabas ; and Luke, “ the beloved physician” shared both their travel and their toil—his own doings unrecorded, simply be¬ cause he was himself the author of the narrative.1 Seeing, then, that the practice of the apostolic Church points so plainly to the appropriateness of uniting the healing of disease with the preaching of the Gospel, as a means of spreading abroad the latter, the only surprise need be that the system so hallowed by example, and enjoined al¬ most by direct precept, should have been hitherto so little pursued. True, the circumstances of the pre¬ sent day and of that epoch are not exactly the same. The power of miracles has been withdrawn ; but the wisdom and experience of ages have been given instead; and, under many circumstances, even now the power of healing is very wonderful. The heathen, or Gentiles, to whom the apostles went— the Romans and Greeks, for example—were highly civilized for the time, and more versant and skilled in the healing art than all the nations around ; for, be it remembered, it was the time of Celsus, and he was the cotemporary of Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. The legitimate deduction from this, however, seems