The Views of Sri Aurobindo (in His own words) on
Disease & Medical Science.
Disease
is needlessly prolonged and ends in death oftener than is inevitable, because
the mind of the patient supports and dwells upon the disease of his body.
Medical
science has been more a curse to man kind than a blessing. It has broken the
force of epidemics and unveiled a marvelous surgery, but, also it has weakened
the natural health of man and multiplied individual diseases; it has implanted
fear and dependence in the mind and body; it has taught our health to repose
not on natural soundness but a rickety and distasteful crutch compact from the
mineral and vegetable kingdoms.
The
doctor aims a drug at a disease; some times it hits, sometimes misses. The
misses are left out of account, the hits treasured up, reckoned and
systematized into a science.
We
laugh at the savage for his faith in the medicine-man; but how are the
civilized less superstitious who have faith in the doctor? The savage finds
that when a certain incantation is repeated, he often recovers from a certain
disease; he believes. The civilized
patient finds that when he doses himself according to a certain prescription,
he often recovers from a certain disease; he believes. Where is the difference?
The
north-country Indian herdsman, attacked by fever, sits in the chill stream of a
river for an hour or more and rises up free and healthy. If the educated man
did the same, he would perish, not because the same remedy in its nature kills
one and cures another, but because our bodies have been fatally indoctrinated
by the mind in to false habits.
It
is not the medicine that cures so much as the patient’s faith in the doctor and
the medicine. Both are a clumsy substitute for the natural faith in one’s own
self - power which they have themselves destroyed.
The
healthiest ages of mankind were those in which there were the fewest material
remedies.
The
most robust and healthy race left on earth were the African savages; but how
long can they so remain after their physical consciousness, has been
contaminated by the mental aberrations of the civilized ?
We
ought to use the divine health in us to cure and prevent diseases; but Galen
and Hippocrates and their tribe have given us instead an armoury of drugs and a
barbarous Latin hocus-pocus as our physical gospel.
Medical
Science is well-meaning and its practioners often benevolent and not seldom
self sacrificing; but when did the well-meaning of the ignorant save them from
harm doing?
If
all remedies were really and themselves efficacious and all medical theories
sound, how would that console us for our lost natural health and vitality? The
upas-tree is sound in all its parts, but it is still a upas-tree.
The
spirit within us is the only all-efficient doctors and the submission of the
body to it the one true panacea.
God
within is infinite and self-fulfilling Will. Un-effected by the fear of death
canst thou leave to Him, not as an experiment, but with a calm and entire faith
thy ailment? Thou shalt find that in the end He exceeds the skill of a million
doctors.
Health
protected by twenty-thousand precautions is the gospel of the doctors; but it
is not God’s evangel for the body, not nature’s.
Man was once naturally healthy and could
revert to their primal condition if he were suffered; but Medical Science
pursues our body with an innumerable pack of drugs and assails the imagination
with ravening hordes of microbes.
I
would rather die and have done with it than spend life in defending myself
against a phantasmal siege of microbes. If that is to be barbarous,
unenlightened, I embrace gladly my Cimmerian darkness.
Surgeons
save and cure by cutting and maiming. Why not rather seek to discover Nature’s
direct all-powerful remedies?
It
should take long for self - cure to replace medicine, because of the fear, self
distrust and unnatural physical reliance on drugs which Medical Science has
taught to our minds and bodies and made our second nature.
Medicine
is necessary to our bodies in disease only because our bodies have learned the
art of not getting well without medicines. Even so, one sees often that the
moment nature chooses for recovery is that in which the life is abandoned as
hopeless by the doctors.
Distrust
of the creative power within us was our physical fall from paradise. Medical
Science and a bad heredity are the two angels of God who stand at the gates to
forbid our return and re-entry.
Medical
Science to the human body is like a great power which enfeebles a smaller state
by its protection or like a benevolent robber who knocks his victim flat and
riddles him with wounds in order that he may devote his life to healing and
serving the shattered body.
Drugs
cured the body when they do not merely trouble or poison it, but only if their
physical attack on the disease is supported by the force of the spirit; if that
force can be made to work freely, drugs are at once superfluous.
Thoughts and Aphorisms
Of
Sri Aurobindo
.
