p. 303 | Health Department by H. L. Hastings

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 29, 1875

Health Department.

By H. L. Hastings

"Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth." 3 John 2.

Doctors in the Judgment.

The practice of medicine is fraught with the gravest responsibilities. The most faithful and conscientious physicians are liable to make mistakes, and that, too, when a mistake may cost a life; and a careless, or intemperate, or incompetent physician may spread death and havoc through an entire community.

Sometimes the council of such men, when followed, leads not only to death, but to perdition; and there is hardly a vice or a habit which debases and destroys mankind but that some "doctor says it is good," and often under direct medical advice, the victim enters the downward road.

Sometimes the physician comprehends the importance of his position. The Medical and Surgical Reporter states that long before the temperance reform became prominent in America, a missionary from the West Indies sought medical advice from the famous Dr. Rush, and when a very unpalatable medicine was prescribed, the patient asked if he could not take a little "good old Jamaica" with it.

"No, sir," the doctor decidedly replied.

"Why, sir, what harm will it do?" demanded the West Indian.

"What harm will it do?" continued Dr. Rush; "I am determined no man shall rise on the day of Judgment and say, 'Dr. Rush made me a drunkard!'"

If Dr. Rush feared to meet a throng of liquor-drinking patients in the day of Judgment, what will be the condition of those doctors who prescribe spirituous liquors for almost every disease, or those nostrum makers who sell thousands of barrels of ardent spirits under the form of patent medicines; or of those religious editors whose papers advertise these mixtures far and wide, and thus lure thousands of the unwary to intemperance and perdition?—H. L. HASTINGS., in The Christian.