Great Construction

“Medical Science Short Accounts”

A Peculiar Story, One
     This is an account I previously heard from someone. A doctor’s son came down with appendicitis, underwent surgery, but died. The doctor was later heard to say, “In truth, if he hadn’t been related to me, he might have pulled through. From the standpoint of medicine in such cases, the standard practice demands surgery, so performing a surgical operation was the only thing to be done,” but I thought this was certainly a peculiar line of reasoning.


A Peculiar Story, Two
     Once when I suffered from a toothache, I thought it was because the day before the dentist had stuffed cotton soaked with medicine into my teeth, so I told the dentist I wanted him to take it out, that I thought by doing so, my toothache would get would get better. He said that was not supposed to happen and asked me to wait a day, and the next day when I went back to get it taken out, he said, “I spent the whole night going through German-language dentistry books and I could not find one example where that particular medicine caused pain.” I replied, “Whether it is ‘supposed’ to or not, it hurts, so take it out!” He reluctantly took the cotton soaked with medicine out from my teeth and the pain went away.


A Peculiar Story, Three
     This episode is also from the time of my toothache. I had Dr. So-and-so look at my chronic toothache. He said in effect, “The pain will absolutely go away so come for treatment for two weeks.” I did as he said. The pain in my tooth did not lessen at all, and I called him on it. He replied, “Even if there is some pain, your tooth itself is a lot better,” which I thought a strange thing to say.
     “I don’t care about any tooth disease! I just want the pain to go away….”


A Peculiar Story, Four
     This is something that happened to me once. A certain middle-aged woman had something in her head and it was continually talking. The voice was so persistent that she felt she would go crazy. These were her symptoms. At the time she had been hospitalized and spent a year in the internal medicine ward of the Imperial University of Tokyo Hospital but had showed no signs of improvement. Her doctor said, “You have already recovered, so you can be discharged.” The woman told her doctor that the problem had not gone away and was still there, to which the doctor replied, “I have checked you all over thoroughly and there is nothing wrong anywhere.” The woman thought this peculiar but left the hospital. After I treated her for two months, she recovered completely. This story shows one of the defects in materialistically-based medical science, because the cause of her particular illness was in the spirit, invisible to the eye.


A Peculiar Story, Five
     You often hear that when a doctor’s child comes down with something, that that doctor will not treat the child but ask a colleague for treatment. There cannot be anything as peculiar as this. To be a doctor and still entrust the life of one so dear to you to someone else just does not sound reasonable. I am guessing that doctors are afraid that when it comes to their own children, they may make a mistake. In which case, their judgment differs in no way from that of someone who reads horoscopes.

Chijôtengoku, Issue 10, page 7, November 20, 1949
translated by cynndd