Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (review)

In this stimulating and important book, Heather D. Curtis examines the first generation of modern faith healing in American Protestantism. The predecessors of Oral Roberts and Benny Hinn first began to proclaim what they called “divine healing” around 1870. Thousands of men and especially women responded to the teachings of Charles Cullis, Carrie Judd, A. B. Simpson, and others by trusting God to meet their medical needs and keep their bodies well. The basic claim of these largely urban, middle- and upper-class proponents was that God willed to heal the ill bodies of believers, if only they would accept by faith the gift of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Healing for the body, then, paralleled the evangelical Protestant understanding of salvation for the soul.

Curtis argues that the divine healing movement that arose in the 1870s and achieved a measure of prominence and notoriety in the last two decades of the nineteenth century sought to replace a long-standing Protestant understanding of the relationship of sickness, suffering, and God’s sovereign will. Sickness and the suffering it engendered, though a product of living in a fallen world, were seen in this older conception not as a reflection of God’s absence or a limitation on his goodness. Rather, God allowed or willed his children to suffer in order to enable them to grow in grace and faith, their trials offering opportunities to enhance their spiritual maturity. Advocates of divine healing rejected this “doctrine of afflictive providence,” with its “ideal sanctified suffering” (pp. 50, 48), and the resignation to the sickbed that accompanied it. Instead, they insisted that God desired for his children not sickness and passivity but health and active service, and they offered sufferers a set of spiritual practices or “devotional ethics” (p. 12) designed to actualize the divine will.

Teachers of divine healing included ordained and lay men and women, who conveyed their message through preaching, publications, and conventions throughout the world of late-nineteenth-century evangelical Protestantism, especially in what was known as the holiness movement that arose in Methodism but spread far beyond its boundaries. Drawing upon extensive research in primary sources, Curtis skillfully situates the healing movement in the broader context of social and cultural patterns relating to gender norms, health reform movements, and urban missions, as well as theological developments. In a setting that often encouraged female dependence, passivity, and circumspection, for instance, divine healing empowered many ailing women to rise from their sickbeds and engage in lives of vital service and leadership in urban and foreign missions. While men also received healing by faith, women represented the clear majority of participants in the movement, as well as a substantial portion of the leadership. Women like Judd, Anna Prosser, and Mary Mossman became well known in part through the establishment of “faith homes,” where sick followers who had learned of divine healing could come and reside for a sustained period of teaching and prayer in order to facilitate their embrace of healing. Whether as pilgrims traveling to faith homes or in their own residences, ill believers were instructed to pray in faith, trusting in God’s promise of healing, and then to “act faith” (p. 81 ff), believing that they were in fact healed regardless of the evidence of their senses.

Not surprisingly, this formula provoked enormous criticism from medical and religious sources. Physicians decried the reckless rejection of their own medical authority—most divine healing advocates taught followers to turn away from doctors and medicines in order to trust in the superior ways of the Great Physician— at the very time at which they were trying to consolidate it in the midst of a wide range of popular therapeutic alternatives, from homeopathy to hydroptherapy to religious healing programs like Christian Science. Curtis notes that in a medical...