Modern Medical Science and the Divine Province of God

“Modern Medical Science and the Divine

Providence of God”: Rethinking

the Place of Religion in Postwar

U.S. Medical History

JANET GOLDEN* AND EMILY K. ABEL**

*History Department, Rutgers University, Camden, Camden, New Jersey 08192.

Email: [email protected]**Fielding School of Public Health, University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT. Drawing on a large cache of letters to John and Frances Guntherafter the death of their son as well as memoirs and fiction by bereavedparents, this essay challenges the assumptions of secularization that infusehistories of twentieth-century American medicine. Many parents whoexperienced the death of children during the postwar period relied heavilyon religion to help make sense of the tragedies medicine could not prevent.Parental accounts included expression of belief in divine intervention andthe power of prayer, gratitude for God’s role in minimizing suffering, con-fidence in the existence of an afterlife, and acceptance of the will of God.Historians seeking to understand how parents and families understood boththe delivery of medical care and the cultural authority of medical sciencemust integrate an understanding of religious experiences and faith into theirwork. KEYWORDS: medicine, religion, children, death.

FOLLOWING the publication of Death Be Not Proud in 1949, docu-menting the death of their son after a fifteen-month battle withbrain cancer, the author John Gunther and his ex-wife Frances

Gunther (who wrote “A Word from Frances” that was appended tothe book) received an outpouring of letters. Many parents wroteto describe the deaths of their own children. While Gunther had

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scrupulously avoided the topic of religion, a substantial number ofletters addressed the subject forthrightly. “Our five year old son, anonly child, was taken with Lukemia on March 24, 1947,” a motherfrom Sacramento, California, wrote to Gunther. “As I look backnow, how we never lack faith knowing and believing if it was God’swill he’d get well.”1

The intersection of religion and medicine in the twentieth centuryand the way spiritual beliefs (or their absence) and scientific medicineshaped patients’ experiences of illness is an enormous subject. Weprobe one aspect of this to show how recounted observations ofchildren’s deaths reveal the often-critical role played by religious faithin an era of growing therapeutic optimism. As Roy Porter noted,medical history extends far beyond doctors and hospitals, and“we must lower the historical gaze onto the sufferers.”2 Narratives ofdeath present medical historians with a vital window into the worldof patienthood.3

Assumptions of secularization permeate histories of twentieth-century medicine. The transformation of hospitals from religious andwelfare institutions propels narrative accounts. Historians describetheir evolution into medical workshops that aligned surgical proce-dures with discoveries in asepsis, offered patients trained nursing care,and employed clinical laboratories and treatments that made diagnosisand cure more likely. The religious metaphors that suffuse those his-tories suggest that people transferred their faith in religion to faith inmedicine. Modern hospitals are referred to as “temples of science.”4

The recoveries of patients, thanks to antibiotic therapies, are called“miracles.” Michael Bliss describes how William Osler’s textbookbecame “the Bible of medical attention” and “helped to spread thegospel of the new scientific medicine,” and notes that Osler was

1. Gunther papers, Box 48, Folder 1, September 30, 1949, Special Collections ResearchCenter, University of Chicago Library, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter John Gunther papers).Not all letters were dated.

2. Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View,” Theory Soc., 1985, 14, 175–98.3. The subject of patients’ experiences with religion and medicine encompasses areas

outside the scope of this article including the analysis of the prayer and faith as a supplementalpart of care, tests of the efficacy of faith healing, and what the legal system calls religion-basedmedical neglect. See, for example, Shawn Francis Peters, When Prayer Fails; Faith Healing,Children, and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

4. Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System(New York: Basic Books, 1987); and Rosemary Stevens, In Sickness and in Wealth: America’sHospitals in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

Golden and Abel : Place of Religion 581

“elevated into something like the patron saint of [Johns] Hopkins,”while students at that institution sought “salvation through science.”5

For many patients, however, salvation came not through science, butfrom faith, as personal accounts attest and as historians and sociolo-gists studying religion have described.6 Medical historians, we sug-gest, need to weave this literature into their own accounts and eschewarguments implicitly resting on a progressive shift from the religiousto the secular. The tendency to emphasize the secular and to neglectreligion is not unique to medical historians; scholars have made clearthat this is an omission that recurs through the writing of modernAmerican history generally.7

Our discussion begins with observations on the historical role ofreligion in many narratives of childhood death and then turns to ananalysis of parents’ (especially mothers’) responses to children’s deathsfrom the 1920s to the 1990s. The deaths of children challenge parentswith fundamental existential questions that lead many to seek answersthrough religious faith and understanding. We draw on the largecache of letters sent to the Gunthers’ as well as on memoirs andfiction. We focus on children between the ages of five and fifteen—those past the age of greatest risk and old enough to have, in somecases, articulated to family members their experiences of illness andthose young enough not to have begun the transition to adulthood.Scholars have various definitions of religion as a visible cultural prac-tice and of spirituality as an inner feeling. We employ both to under-stand the experiences expressed by individuals recounting the deathsof their children. We organize the discussion with a loose taxonomyof religious responses to children’s deaths, not as a precise

5. Michael Bliss, The Making of Modern Medicine: Turning Points in the Treatment of Disease(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 40, 50–51.

6. On secularization theory, see, for example, David Gary Shaw, “Modernity between Usand Them: The Place of Religion within History,” Hist. Theory, 2006, 45, 1–9; DarrenE. Sherkat and Christopher G. Ellison, “Recent Developments and Current Controversiesin the Sociology of Religion,” Am. Rev. Sociol., 1999, 25, 363–94; William H. Swatos, Jr.and Kevin J. Christiano, “Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept,” Sociol. Religion,1999, 60, 209–28; R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for theSociological Study of Religion in the United States,” Am. J. Sociol., 1992, 98, 1044–93.

7. See, for example, Jon Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Mod-ern American History,” J. Am. Hist., 2004, 90, 1357–78; and Kevin M. Schultz and PaulHarvey, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Recent Trends in American Religious History andHistoriography,” J. Am. Acad. Religion, 2010, 78, 129–62. Neither of these articles addressesthe absence of religion in medical histories.

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classification but in order to detail the range of experiences thatdeserve consideration.

RELIGION AND DEATH

It would be difficult to ignore the central place of religion in theexperiences of grieving parents in the nineteenth-century UnitedStates. As Drew Gilpin Faust described in her book on death and theCivil War, families were expected to listen closely to the last wordsuttered by the dying to discern the state of the soul and the prospectof everlasting life.8 Children as well as adults could provide evidenceof salvation. The most famous example is the fictional Little Eva inHarriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Convinced she would seeUncle Tom and Mammy in heaven, Eva died peacefully: “A bright,a glorious smile passed over her face, and she said, brokenly,—‘O love,—joy—peace!’ gave one sign, and passed from death to life!”9

The vast “consolation literature” of the nineteenth century, writ-ten both by ministers and by women (writing primarily for otherwomen), typically focused on the loss of children. Bereaved motherswere urged to accept death as the will of God, to express gratitudethat the child was now free of suffering, and to look forward to ulti-mate reunion in heaven.10 Women filled their personal letters and dia-ries with accounts of their struggles to adhere to those precepts. In afew instances, religion deepened rather than attenuated despair. Somebereaved parents berated themselves for having become too attachedto their children. Others feared that the severity of their grief revealedthe insufficiency of faith. “This shadow of death should not rest uponour spirits if we truly believed,” Mary Wilder Foote confided to hersister after the death of her baby: “The bursting life around me should

8. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).

9. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Elizabeth Emmons (New York: NortonCritical Edition, 1994), 257.

10. See Ann Douglas, “Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the NorthernUnited States, 1830–1880,” in Death in America, ed. David E. Stannard (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 46–68; Sally G. McMillen, Motherhood in the OldSouth: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 1990); and Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman, Centuries of Solace: Expressionsof Maternal Grief in Popular Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).


remind me of immortality instead of calling up sorrowing thoughts ofthe precious bud.”11

Nevertheless, women also testified to the support religious teach-ings provided. After blaming herself for having loved her daughter“too well,” a Georgia woman continued, “The thought of beingreunited with our darling is indeed a blessed [and] comforting one[and] it weakens the pang of present separation.”12 As novelist Cathar-ine M. Sedgwick wrote to a sister whose oldest son had died, “TheHoly Spirit is your comforter, and let us acknowledge the ineffableconsolation with which he has softened your calamity.”13 If religioncould not entirely control unbearable emotions, it could “weaken”or “soften” them, thus enabling the bereaved to gain at least a modi-cum of critical distance.14

Developments in the twentieth century turned attention away fromthese consolations of religion for the parents of gravely ill children.Massive public health campaigns during the first half of the centurylargely dropped nineteenth-century religious rhetoric to emphasizehow childhood deaths were preventable through voluntary humanaction. Talk of God’s will was replaced by talk of proper medical andhygienic interventions. Public health nurses and doctors increasinglyviewed acceptance of God’s will not as an important spiritual goal butrather as a sign of fatalism, inadequate willpower, or a failure to appreci-ate the benefits of modern medicine. Their case was only strengthenedby the dramatic changes in childhood mortality in the period. The evi-dence was clear.15 The mortality of children age five to nine fell from466.1 per 100,000 in 1900 to 60.9 by 1950; for children age ten tofourteen, the figures were 298 in 1900 and 57.6 in 1950.16 This notable

11. Caleb and Mary Wilder Foote: Reminiscences and Letters, ed. Mary Wilder Tileston(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 95.

12. Amelia Akeurst Lines, To Raise Myself a Little: The Diaries of Jennie, a Georgia Teacher,1851–1886, ed. Thomas Dyer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982), 207.

13. Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick, ed. Mary E. Dewey (New York: Harper andBrothers, 1871), 110.

14. See Emily K. Abel, The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) for a fuller discussion of these issues.

15. On maternal education to prevent infant mortality, see Richard A. Meckel, Save theBabies: American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850–1929(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

16. Michael R. Haines, ed., Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Online Edi-tion, Table Ab988–1047, Death rate by sex and age: 1900–98, doi:10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Ab912-1137.


decline in mortality in turn focused historical interest on the scientificdevelopments, legal and physical infrastructure, and social practicesthought to propel this demographic transition. Scholars detailed thepublic health interventions and medical advances that transformedonce deadly infections into treatable conditions. But this search toexplain the successes equally blunted scholarly attention to the innu-merable instances in which medical interventions failed to preventchildhood deaths.17

Even as mortality rates declined, parents still mourned the deaths oftheir children and continued to rely on their religious faith as they nav-igated these personal tragedies. What physicians were liable to see as atreatment failure or a lack of a cure, some patients and parents inter-preted as God’s will and the passage from life on earth to everlasting lifein heaven. A mother from Chesapeake, Ohio, for example, recorded inher daughter’s baby book her death from pneumonia in 1935 at agefive. The medical account was brief, but there was a lengthy descrip-tion of the funeral service, which concluded with her writing that herdaughter was “up in heaven with her savior.”18 Another motherrecorded her seven-year-old son’s words as he lay dying in an AnnArbor, Michigan, hospital. He spoke frequently about his love for Jesusas well as Jesus’ love for him. Although convinced of the existence ofheaven, he worried about the practicalities of travel. “How might Jesusget me,” he asked his mother, “he hasent such a big stepladder, has he?Or will he use a Baloon? He won’t let me fall, will he?”19

Parents interviewed by the Federal Writers Project of the NewDeal’s Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1940 simi-larly described their children’s deaths in religious terms. HenryMitchell, a Native American canoe maker in Maine, invoked theconcept of divine will to explain the death of his five-year-old daugh-ter after an accident. “Of course it shocked us terribly,” he said.

17. On children’s historical experiences, see Russell Viner and Janet Golden, “Children’sExperiences of Illness,” in Medicine in the Twentieth Century, ed. Roger Cooter and John Pick-stone (Amsterdam: Harwood International, 2001), 575–88. For a contemporary perspective,see Myra Bluebond-Langner, The Private Worlds of Dying Children (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1980); and Myra Bluebond-Langner, In the Shadow of Illness: Parents and Sib-lings of the Chronically Ill Child (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

18. Baby’s Biography (Utica, New York: Foster Bros. Mfg. Co., 1913). UCLA biomedicallibrary copy HQ779.B1145 1913.

19. Melcena Denny Burns, The Book of Baby Mine (Simplicity Co., c. 1915). UCLA bio-medical library copy HQ779.B724 1915b.


“A parent who has seen one of his children die has passed through anexperience that he will remember. But God knows best. He looksdown from up there and sees all things. All we can do is to carry on asbest we can and try to [smile?] when the going is toughest.”20 Anotherinterviewee, Mrs. Ovide Morin, a French Canadian woman also fromMaine, had to struggle to gain acceptance of her child’s death, a processthat lasted nearly a decade. After her eight-year-old daughter died, apriest reminded Mrs. Morin that the girl is “happy in heaven, and ifyou really loved her, you would be glad that it is so. A time will comewhen you will be glad she is dead.” Nine years later, the mother fell toher knees and cried while gazing at a picture of her daughter. “I feltglad she was dead,” she told the interviewer, “I know that she is happy—far happier, perhaps, than if she stayed with us. I know I will see heragain, for we all must die. I think of her often, now, but I never feelhate because she was taken from me. God knows best.”21

The medical triumphalism of the post-World War II period leftreligious sentiments no less potent. America’s victory, abetted by thedevelopment of penicillin, radar, and the atomic bomb, generatedunprecedented optimism about the scientific enterprise.22 The war“taught one lesson of incalculable importance,” declared the authorof a 1946 Women’s Home Companion piece titled “We Could CureCancer Now,” “The lesson: that with unlimited money to spend wecan buy the answers to almost any scientific problem.”23 A poll con-ducted by the National Opinion Research Center in 1948 found that86 percent surveyed believed that there had been a great deal of pro-gress in the field of medicine and surgery in the previous twenty-fiveyears.24 In this same era, federal and private funding for medical

20. A Visit with Henry Mitchell, manuscript, from Library of Congress, American LifeHistories, Manuscripts form the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–40, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/wpalh1.13151128.

21. Additional Personal History, Ovide Morin, manuscript, from Library of Congress, Amer-ican Life Histories, Manuscripts form the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936–40, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/wpalh1.13120410.

22. On scientific triumphalism and religion, see James Gilbert, Redeeming Culture: Ameri-can Religion in an Age of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Gilbert doesnot discuss medicine.

23. “We Could Cure Cancer Now!” Woman’s Home Companion, 1946, 35, 176. On thecancer prevention and screening crusade, see James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease, Cancerand Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987).

24. Shirley A. Star, “Animal Experimentation: A Survey of Information, Interest andOpinion on the Question among the General Public, High School Teachers and Practicing


http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/wpalh1.13151128








research soared. And hospital care expanded rapidly. The 1946 Hospi-tal Survey and Construction Act (better known as the Hill–BurtonAct) provided federal grants to states to construct community hospi-tals. Over the next twenty-five years, the program disbursed $2.5billion, adding three hundred and fifty thousand beds to the nation’shospital system.25

What medical historians rarely note is that religiosity flourishedalongside the growing faith in medical science. As Americans movedto the suburbs amid a postwar baby boom, a building boom in theconstruction of houses of worship, as well as of hospitals, occurred.Attendance at religious services rose dramatically. During the middledecades of the twentieth century, most Americans belonged to reli-gious congregations. Belief in God and afterlife reached its apogee.26

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 deepened and broad-ened American religious pluralism, transforming, as one scholarnoted,

the demography of the nation, ideas of citizenship, politics, the waysAmerica conducts business, how the nation develops its economicsand labor and interprets its legal traditions, how Americans use mediaand the marketing of entertainment, how Americans articulate indi-vidual and collective identities and memories, and how the nationconstructs and reconstructs its cultures from the local to the state to thefederal levels.27

Medicine and science did not remain untouched by the changeswrought by the new religious diversity.

Not surprisingly, parents turned to both physicians and clergywhen their children faced fatal illnesses. A researcher in the early1960s interviewed twenty-six mothers one year after their childrendied of cancer. Twenty-five stated that they had received visits fromtheir own ministers or a hospital chaplain before the deaths. The one

Physicians,” September, 1948, in National Opinion Research Center, Report No. 39. Chicago,1949.

25. Judith R. Lave and Lester B. Lave, The Hospital Construction Act: An Evaluation of theHill–Burton Program, 1948–1973, Evaluation Studies 16 (Washington, District of Columbia:American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1974), 7–15.

26. See Swatos, Jr. and Christiano, “Secularization Theory,” 209–28.27. Richard D. Hecht, “Active versus Passive Pluralism: A Changing Style of Civil Reli-

gion,” Ann. Am. Acad. Pol. Soc. Sci., 2007, 612, 133–51.


exception was a young woman who had just moved to the commu-nity, had not yet made contact with a new church, and did not knowabout the existence of hospital chaplains. Respondents privileged thework of health professionals over clergy; when asked who had beenmost helpful when the children died, eleven mothers mentioned adoctor and five a nurse, while only seven said a clergyman. Theothers responded either that they did not know or did not offer aname.28

Putting knowledge of religious practices back into medical historyenriches rather than diminishes our understanding of the culturalpower of medical science. In answer to a 1997 Princeton/Newsweekpoll, which asked “When people pray for God’s help in . . . healingsomeone with a disease considered incurable by medical science . . .do you think their prayers are ever answered or not?” 79 percentresponded “yes, prayers sometimes answered.”29 Many Americanshad faith in medicine and in prayer; medical historians have not fullyexamined this nexus, which would allow for a greater understandingof how patients and families experienced and responded to illness inthe twentieth century.

THE GUNTHER LETTERS

The warp of traditional religious discourse and the weft of the lan-guage of medical science appear in the thousands of letters sent toJohn Gunther and his ex-wife Frances Gunther after the 1949 publi-cation of Death Be Not Proud. Both were journalists and authors. Johnwas the best known for his “Inside” books about Europe, Asia, LatinAmerica, Africa, Russia and the United States, as well as others.Death Be Not Proud proved to be his most enduring work, and itremains in print with the most recent edition appearing in 2007.That book described the death of their eighteen-year-old son after afifteen-month battle with brain cancer. Condensed versions of thebook appeared in Ladies Home Journal, Reader’s Digest, and Coronet,reaching a broad popular readership. As Gretchen Krueger notes,Gunther’s writing epitomized the era’s enthusiasm about medical

28. Dorothy P. Geis, “Mothers’ Perceptions of Care Given Their Dying Children,”Am. J. Nurs., 1965, 65, 107.

29. Kenneth L. Woodward, Princeton Survey Research Associates/Newsweek Poll,March 20–21, 1997, “Is God Listening?” Newsweek, March 31, 1997, 57–65.


science, and she used the Gunther letters to explore this theme.30

Despite his son’s hopeless prognosis, Gunther’s faith in medicinenever faltered. “The thought never left us,” he wrote, “that if only wecould defer somehow what everybody said was inevitable, if only wecould stave off Death for a few weeks or months, something totallynew might turn up.”31 Until death was imminent, Gunther agreed totreatment after treatment. And he continued to trust the potentialof medical science, donating his profits from the book to cancerresearch.32

Many letters addressed to the Gunthers were from parents whosechildren had either died or currently faced life-threatening illnesses.Most shared John Gunther’s faith in the power of medicine. Withnew breakthroughs (such as Farber’s development of aminopterin forthe treatment of childhood leukemia in the late 1940s, and polio vac-cine in the 1950s) seeming to appear regularly, and with federalresearch funding steadily growing, letter writers were especially reluc-tant to accept that death was inevitable. A father who described hisexperience watching his child with a brain tumor die “inch by inch”stressed that he had been “willing to try anything,” “always hopingagainst hope” to save the boy.33 The doctor who diagnosed AngelaBurns’ daughter Mary Sheila with leukemia urged the parents “not togive up hope, that they were doing work with leukemia at Children’sHospital in Boston.” “So off we went to Children’s,” Burns contin-ued, “where transfusions were given her and therapy started.” Burnsassumed Gunther had heard of the recent use of “aminopterin andkindred drugs for leukemia,” as well as of the chief pathologist, SidneyFarber, who “had established a clinic not long before . . . whereafflicted children from all over were treated.” The side effects werehorrific, first daily bouts of intense nausea and then a dozen majorhemorrhages; the treatment produced only a brief remission. Never-theless, Burns knew she had done “everything humanly possible tosave our child’s life. Nothing was overlooked, no chance was

30. Gretchen Krueger, Hope and Suffering: Children, Cancer, and the Paradox of ExperimentalMedicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

31. John Gunther, Death Be Not Proud (New York, New York: Harper, 1949), 57.32. Krueger, Hope and Suffering.33. Gunther papers, Box 48, Folder 1, September 30, 1949.


ignored.” Mary Sheila died with an IV in a superficial vein, about toundergo one more treatment.34

Several parents looked to John Gunther for expert guidance innavigating the healthcare system. Doctors had told Mrs. Fred Blethenthat her nine-year-old son Fred was “doomed to die” from progres-sive muscular dystrophy. She hoped Gunther knew something morehopeful about the ailment.35 Faith Neal was “going through the‘clutching at straws’ stage” with her two-and-a-half-year-old sonBobby, who had metastasized cancer. He was now in the hospital, butthe doctors had suspended X-ray treatment while waiting for him torecover from dangerous side effects. She was “writing this letter inthe hope that you might have learned something through your expe-rience that would help our son. If you know of anything, anyone,anywhere, who could help our son, would you please let us knowimmediately?”36 Others asked for referrals to physicians or hospitals.

The letters also demonstrated enormous confidence in medicalresearch. Many correspondents expressed the hope that sales of DeathBe Not Proud would enable Gunther to make a substantial donation tocancer research and that the publisher would give the proceeds of thebook to this cause.37 Other writers commented that they and theirfriends had sent contributions to hospitals and research institutes in thechildren’s names, hoping that they would be memorialized in some waywith the development of new knowledge and treatments. And sometook solace in the potential of a living legacy that might come from theknowledge doctors gained from treating their children. Lea A. Gray’sson had waged a six-month battle against cancer of the lymph glandsbefore dying a few days after his twelfth birthday. During that time, he“went through the ups and downs and procedures” that Gunther knew“so well—blood tests, X-rays, radio-therapies, biopsies, tappings forremoval of fluid in the chest cavity, etc.” Now Gray could “only hope”that through him “the medical profession may have gained someknowledge that will help toward saving lives in the future.”38 Angela

34. Gunther papers, Box 45, Folder 2. For a fuller account of this case, see Krueger, Hopeand Suffering.

35. Gunther papers, Box 45, Folder 3, March 2, 1949, John Gunther papers.36. Gunther papers, Box 47, Folder 15, March 7, 1949, John Gunther papers.37. Ken Cuthbertson, Inside: The Biography of John Gunther (Chicago: Bonus Books,

1992), 292.38. Gunther papers, Box 46, Folder 2, February 28, 1949, John Gunther papers.


Burns acknowledged that, “frankly,” Sidney Farber and his staff “wereexperimenting and they needed children to carry on their work.” Shedid not resent this but instead believed that “our child did not die invain. . . . We foresee a long period of time before cancer is conquered.If our child has had a little hand in it we shall be satisfied.”39

Nevertheless, a belief in the power of postwar medicine was notthe only theme dominant in the letters. Within them also are power-ful accounts of the role of religion in responding to the crisis of achild’s deadly disease. The predominant expressions fall into some-times overlapping categories: expressions of belief in divine interven-tion and the power of prayer, gratitude for God’s role in minimizingsuffering, confidence in the existence of an afterlife, and acceptanceof the will of God. In the majority of cases, religion had been part offamily life prior to the child’s illness. In some cases, the threat of thechild’s death precipitated a return to religious practices that had beenrelinquished. And in a few instances, the inexplicable tragedy led to arejection of long-held religious beliefs.

Several correspondents assumed that divine intervention as well astherapeutic effectiveness determined the outcome of disease. Theo-dore Howes and his wife, for example, consented to an operation toremove their son’s malignant brain tumor because they trusted in“God and Divine Guidance.” When the boy suffered a serious infec-tion two years later, “modern Medical Science and the Divine Provi-dence of God resolved it.”40 Like many nineteenth-century parents,some letter writers viewed their children’s deaths as the will of God.After his eleven-year-old son’s second operation for a brain tumor,O. L. Blakeman realized that “everything known to medical sciencehad been accomplished and that God alone would decide the out-come.”41 Edgar A. Holliday’s two-year-old son had died from another“incurable disease.” At the time, he and his wife “were naturally at aloss to understand why it had to be our boy, however, being Christianpeople we felt that it was God’s Will, having committed the boy toHim it was not ours to question.” Now Holliday counseled Gunther:

39. Gunther papers, Box 45, Folder 4, John Gunther papers. Burns was correct; Farber’swork in pediatric pathology and modern chemotherapy indeed involved testing regimens onchildren that led to a treatment for childhood leukemia. See Siddhartha Mukherjee, TheEmperor of All Maladies; A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2010).

40. Gunther papers, Box 46, Folder 3, John Gunther papers.41. Gunther papers, Box 45, Folder 4, April 24, 1951, John Gunther papers.


“As I read your story I kept think[ing] of the words ‘God moves in amysterious way His wonders to perform.’ He must have needed yourboy.”42

God, some letters suggested, not only called certain children buttried to minimize their suffering. Blakeman “thank[ed] God” that hisson’s “passing was very easy and not too painful for him.” KatherineGauss Jackson’s son was “only four” when he died of leukemia. She“thanks God every day” that “there was none of his mental anguishto cope with.” God also had saved some children from future suffer-ing on earth. Reflecting back to when her twenty-month-old daugh-ter Prudence died from complications of pneumonia in 1927, MaryEllen Kehoe decided that “God had been infinitely kind” to her.“We were told that she would have been practically an invalid the restof her days if she had lived. Too, I felt so often that the World War IImight have brought her great sorrow, as it did to many girls herage.”43

Parents also derived solace from knowing they were not alone intheir grief. Such knowledge may have been especially important at atime when most parents could expect their children to outlive themand many people assumed medicine had a cure for every affliction.When Elizabeth Cummins entered the church for the funeral of herson Joe, who had died during an appendectomy, she “kept my eyesglued to the statue of the Blessed Virgin and kept repeating to[herself], ‘You gave your only Son,’ surely I can give one of my sixsons.”44 As in the nineteenth century, parents also turned to religionto make sense of a tragedy that seemed almost unendurable. HelenHauser’s eleven-year-old son had died from a sarcoma. Like Gunther,she and her husband “could not understand why a young life of suchpromise should be taken.” Fortunately, God “give[s] us grace toaccept what may come. Without this inner help, we should be lost.”45

Although conceptions of heaven had changed dramatically duringthe past hundred years, parents continued to find comfort in notionsof an afterlife.46 Hazel Ellen Kehoe anticipated a reunion with

42. Gunther papers, Box 46, Folder 4, February 15, 1949, John Gunther papers.43. Gunther papers, Box 46, Folder 7, John Gunther papers.44. Gunther papers, Box 45, Folder 6, January 31, 1949, John Gunther papers.45. Gunther papers, Box 48, Folder 2, John Gunther papers.46. See Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1998).


Prudence: “I think of our little daughter looking down from herHeavenly Home, all with the Infinite Wisdom which comes to all ofus in the Hereafter. . . . She knows that some day we will join her.”47

Elizabeth Custer Nearing read Death Be Not Proud soon after thedeath of her son, another John. Her idea of an external existence wasmuch vaguer than that of Kehoe. Nevertheless, she was convincedthat the spirits of both boys “are alive, more so than when they wereencumbered with bodies.”

If some religious sentiments in the correspondence closely resem-bled those expressed in mid-nineteenth-century Protestant consola-tion literature, others writings revealed the religious pluralism thatcharacterized the United States by the second half of the twentiethcentury. Letters referenced Catholic, Jewish, and Evangelical faithand practice. And this pluralism was evident in the Gunthers’ ownbackground. Perhaps because Frances Gunther’s background wasJudaism, she recoiled from the notion that her son’s death stemmedfrom God-granted purpose. In a “Word from Frances,” appended tothe end of her ex-husband’s book, she criticized the “single theme”dominating condolence letters from friends and acquaintances—“sympathy with us in facing a mysterious stroke of God’s will thatseemed inexplicable, unjustifiable and yet, being God’s will, must alsobe part of some great plan beyond our mortal ken, perhaps sparinghim or us greater pain or loss.”48 Frances concluded that God had not“personally singled out” her son “for any special act, either of ani-mosity or generosity.”49

But she had always “had a spontaneous, instinctive sense of thereality of God” and had “prayed continually” throughout her son’slong illness.50 Spiritual beliefs helped her place her personal tragedyin a larger context. Johnny’s death, she concluded, was only “the finalscene of a play that goes on forever.”51 Rather than imagining anexistence after death, however, she focused on the present, exhortingher readers to live as intensely as possible and to savor their blessings:“Today when I see parents impatient or tired or bored with their chil-dren, I wish I could say to them, But they are alive, think of the

47. Gunther papers, Box 46, Folder 7, John Gunther papers.48. Gunther, Death Be Not Proud, 188.49. Ibid., 188–89.50. Ibid., 188–89.51. Ibid., 191.


wonder of that! They may be a care and a burden, but think, they arealive! You can touch them—what a miracle!”52 The experience ofterrible loss must lead to greater compassion, “obliterating . . . theideas of evil and hate and the enemy, and transmuting them, with thealchemy of suffering, into ideas of clarity and charity.”53 When Fran-ces died in 1964, her obituary noted she was living in Jerusalemas a Zionist activist and writing a book on “the impact of Judaism,Christianity and Islam on politics and history.”54

Letter after letter praised Frances for her insights about the goodlife. Mrs. Frances Weprin, whose three-year-old daughter had “a verybad congenital heart defect,” wished she could make Frances’s post-script “required reading for every man, woman and child in theworld. It expresses the way I feel so pointedly—it is too bad that ittakes a tragedy to awaken most people to the really important thingsin life.”55 Marianne R. Peters recently learned that her “beautifulfour-year-old Patricia” had “severe diabetes.” With Frances’s help,she could now “thank God for the gift of just her life.”56 Elsa Van Bil-liard had lost a ten-year-old son to brain cancer. “We too,” she wrote,“must sing of the joy and happiness that were given us by our sons inthose brief short years.”57

To be sure, not all parents revealed any sense of religiosity. UnlikeFrances, John Gunther never mentioned faith. A few letter writersargued that the death of children disproved the existence of God, andsome turned elsewhere for comfort. “I am easing my ache withliquor,” wrote Dorothy Dolin, the mother of another son who diedof a brain tumor, explaining that she had “no religion and no faith inGod.” Of course, in her rejection of religion, she also acknowledgedits potential to leaven terrible suffering.

For many correspondents, however, medicine and belief werewoven together forming an interlocking web of despair, hope,faith, and consolation. Parents’ accounts of their children’s deaths

52. Ibid., 194.53. Ibid., 195.54. “Frances Gunther, Writer and Zionist,” New York Times, April 7, 1964, 35, ProQuest

Historical Newspapers, http://www.proquest.com/en-US/.55. Frances Fineman Gunther papers, 1915–63, Box 53, February 13, 1949. Schlesinger

Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereafter FrancesGunther papers).

56. Frances Gunther Papers, Box 58, February 13, 1949.57. Frances Gunther papers, Box 58, February 9, 1949.


http://www.proquest.com/en-US/



revealed layers of thought and experience, some of which might alsoappear in medical records and case reports but much of which canonly be found in personal writing. If we are to extract and understandpatients’ experiences of illness at a time when medical scienceincreased its effectiveness and extended its cultural authority, theseaccounts must be mined and the vein of religious faith runningthrough them must be carefully considered.

LATER ACCOUNTS

Other sources testify further to the powerful role of religion in thelives of parents facing the loss of their children, especially in thesetting of prolonged and ultimately futile medical care. Like the Gun-ther letters, they reveal faith in both medical science and divine inter-vention. But where the Gunther letters also illuminated the trustplaced in postwar medical science, some of the later accounts showedgreater skepticism. A 1961 novel presented a much darker view ofboth religion and medicine. Although Peter De Vries is best knownfor his comic writings, he published one bitter, humorless book, TheBlood of the Lamb. The final section is based on the death of his daugh-ter from leukemia shortly before her eleventh birthday. In the novel,Don Wanderhope’s eleven-year-old daughter Carol receives a diag-nosis of leukemia and dies after undergoing a series of horrendoustreatments at a major medical center—the thinly disguised Sloan-Kettering. In the parent’s waiting room, Don meets a father, a mannamed Stein, who expresses contempt for both medicine and reli-gion. Although the doctors place the best possible gloss on Carol’scondition, Stein speaks the truth.58 When Don expresses his gratitudefor the research building, Stein responds, “So death by leukemia isnow a local instead of an express. Same run, only a few more stops.But that’s medicine, the art of prolonging disease.”59 Stein is equallydisdainful of religion: “God is a word banging around in the humannervous system. He exists about as much as Santa Claus.”60 Don spendsa great deal of time with Stein and is deeply influenced by his argu-ments. And yet, as Carol’s end approaches, Don enters a church and

58. Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005

[orig. publication 1961]), 179.59. Ibid., 182–83.60. Ibid., 182.


kneels before the shrine to St. Jude, “Patron of Lost Causes and Hope-less Cases,” and prays for a reprieve: “Give us a year. We will spend it aswe have the last, missing nothing.”61 Like Gunther’s memoir, DeVries’ Blood of the Lamb reached a wide audience. The book was even-tually reprinted as a “Popular Library” volume and a shorter version,entitled “Carol,” was published by Reader’s Digest Condensed Booksand subsequently translated into eight languages.62 The fictional Don’sreturn to church and prayer echoed the testimony of others.

During the late 1960s and 1970s, various events helped to open upthe public discussion of death, including the publication of ElisabethKubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying (1969) and the 1974 establishment ofthe first hospice in the United States. Perhaps as a result, a growing num-ber of parents published narratives chronicling the family’s experienceconfronting fatal illness.63 Death Be Not Proud served as a critical model.64

Because one purpose of the accounts was to memorialize the children,offspring inevitably are portrayed as possessing superior personal quali-ties, especially courage and fortitude. They retain their zest for life, dowell in school, and engage in their normal round of activities even ashospital stays lengthen and fatigue and pain intensify. When death drawsnear, however, beliefs about God and an afterlife assume heightened sig-nificance. These accounts suggest that faith in medicine and God serveas coexisting reservoirs of hope and knowledge to be drawn fromsequentially by some and simultaneously by others.

Johnny (1968), by Owenita Sanderlin, provides an example of howfaith can follow the faltering of science.65 Johnny is eleven when hisparents learn he suffers from leukemia and has only two years to live.His indomitable spirit as well as medical science keep him alivethroughout his fifteenth year. Tennis is his passion, and he continuesto play as often as he can, winning the National Thirteen and UnderDoubles Championship at Chattanooga during a lengthy remission.As the drugs lose their potency, however, he begins to contemplatehis existence after death. “There are two things that I want,” he tells

61. Ibid., 228.62. See Krueger, Hope and Suffering, 114.63. See The Dying Child: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Hazel B. Benson (Westport,

Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1988); and Krueger, Hope and Suffering, 153–54.64. Lucy Bregman and Sara Theirmann, First Person Mortal: Personal Narratives of Death,

Dying and Grief (New York: Paragon House, 1995).65. Owenita Sanderlin, Johnny (South Brunswick, New Jersey: A.S. Barnes and Co.,

1968).


his mother. “I want to get well—I want to go back home, and playtennis and jump over the waves—but if I can’t do that, I just want togo to heaven.”66 Shortly before he dies, he asks for a description ofheaven and confers with a priest, another patient in the hospital, toobtain more information about life after death.

Sportswriter Frank Deford’s best-selling narrative of his eight-year-old daughter’s death from cystic fibrosis, Alex: The Life of a Child(1983), provides an example of a family drawing strength from a beliefin an afterlife. Like many nineteenth- and twentieth-century moth-ers, Deford’s wife Carol promises Alex a heavenly reunion in thefuture. As the end approached, Carol says “You know, Alex, whenyou die, you can see God and talk to Him and tell Him all about us.And we’ll always be together, all four of us, because you’ll keep an eyeon us, and then we’ll meet again in Heaven.”67 A little later, Caroltells Alex because angels were never sick, “they could dance and playamong the clouds in Heaven all day, every day.” Alex “smiled andmanaged to say yes, she already knew that, that she even had it ongood authority that some of the angels wore tutus.”68 After describ-ing her death, Deford remarks that Alex was “up there with God,”a phrase the occurred in many letters to John and Frances Gunther.Just as Death Be Not Proud became a germinal work on the death of achild in the 1940s, Alex: The Life of a Child assumed that role decadeslater. The book served as the basis of a 1986 Emmy-nominated televi-sion movie. Anthropologist Myra Bluebond-Langner, who studiedchildren with cystic fibrosis in the 1980s, reported that the book andmovie were frequent topics of conversation among her subjects.69

The book remains much loved and discussed, with both an excerptand Deford’s reflections on Alex, appearing in a 2008 book onspiritual awakenings.70

Unquestioningly, the faith and practice of parents shaped children’sexperiences of dying, and accounts of children’s beliefs reported byparents are often reflections of their own hopes. Thus, one account of

66. Ibid., 153.67. Frank Deford, Alex: The Life of a Child (New York: New American Library, 1983),

196.68. Ibid., 197.69. Bluebond-Langner, In the Shadow of Illness, 22 n.1, 166.70. Phil Bolsta, Sixty Seconds: One Moment Changes Everything (New York: Atria Books,

2008).


a child who embraced spiritual beliefs that her parents eschewed isremarkable for its portrayal of that divide. Nancy Roach’s The LastDay of April, a 1974 memoir, recounted her daughter Erin’s strugglewith leukemia from her diagnosis at age two-and-a-half until herdeath at seven. Because Roach herself was not a believer, she wassurprised by her daughter’s interest in God.71 When Erin’s deathappeared imminent, Roach “had a tremendous desire to give hersomething to cling to—perhaps a strong religious belief, but some-how I just couldn’t launch into angels, halos and heavenly music.”72

Nevertheless, Erin “talked about the friends she was going to see inheaven and she wondered if God would let her sit on His lap.”73

Like the spiritual lives of patients, those of medical professionalsremain understudied. Bluebond-Langner reported over-hearing aphysician asking residents “What makes you think your medicine isany more powerful than a novena?” Psychiatrist Gordon Livingstonwrote a memoir recounting the death of his six-year-old son fromleukemia in which he wrote, “It comforts me to know of the firmlyreligious people we have heard from who are asking God’s help inways in which they truly believe. I hope that their certain faithredeems my poor agnosticism when the Almighty weighs the fate ofmy son.”74 Unable to visit the boy one day after his bone marrowtransplant, Gordon “went to church myself and prayed with a sincer-ity I can recall only from my youth.”75

Journalist Peggy Anderson’s Children’s Hospital (1985), a nonfictionaccount of six hospitalized children, also reveals the persistent beliefin the power of prayer and acceptance of the will of God. The bookfocuses to a great extent on Mark, a fifteen-year-old dying of cystic

71. Nancy Roach, The Last Days of April (American Cancer Society, 1974).72. Ibid., 35.73. Ibid., 37. Readers might wonder how the child developed her religious knowledge—

possibly from other children she encountered in the hospital, from religious visitors, thehealthcare workers she encountered in the hospital, or from the broader culture. Moreimportant to note, children’s experiences of religion changed as their medical status changed.Bluebond-Langner’s The Private World of Dying Children followed the experiences of termi-nally ill children in a Midwestern hospital. A seven-year-old girl’s drawing of birds and flow-ers changed to images of crucifixions as death approached. A five-year-old boy asked hismother “Do children play in Heaven?” Bluebond-Langner, Private World of Dying Children,185–86, 190.

74. Gordon Livingston, Only Spring: On Mourning the Death of My Son (New York:HarperCollins, 1995), 8.

75. Ibid., 43.


fibrosis. At one point, his mother “had gone down on her kneesbeside her bed and had asked God to please either cure Mark or totake him, thinking at the time that a mother could do nothing harderin the world than ask God to take her child.”76 Another child profiledby Anderson is Frank Ebberly, whose mother similarly invokes thenotion of a divine plan when her son arrives at the hospital in a comaafter being hit by a car. Reading her bible, she understands thatFrank’s fate depends on “God’s will.” She knows “there was nothingmuch she could say to God about a plan she did not understand.”77

She does, however, “tell God that if Freddy was to be taken from her,she was ready to do whatever she had to do to let him go.”78

Several parents who memorialized their children’s deaths hadreturned to religion after a period of neglect. “Our Child Walks inthe Valley of the Shadow,” a 1952 article in Parents Magazine by themother of a six-year-old boy with a fatal cancer, explained that thefamily had become “lax” about religion. The boy’s illness prompted areturn to church. “We go because we believe that Bruce will learnthe solace of a helping Christ.” The parents found regular churchattendance “a help in our time of present trouble.”79 One of the fewpeople to whom the mother had confided the boy’s diagnosis andprognosis was her minister who visited the family at home and sug-gested Bible verses “to give a child hope when he is suffering.”80

Terry Pringle, the author of This Is the Child: A Father’s Story of HisYoung Son’s Battle with Leukemia (1981), grew up accepting withoutquestion the views of his father, a southern Baptist minister. Pringlesubsequently abandoned his faith but he “returned to Jesus” beforehis four-year-old son Eric became sick and thus, he explains, he wasable to help him approach his impending death within a religiousframework. When Eric’s health deteriorates, Terry envisages himselfsitting by his son’s bed and explaining what he believes about death:As Eric’s spirit leaves his body, “he will find that he is above us, ableto look down on this mourning family. He will no longer be in painand will be overcome gradually with the great peace that he has been

76. Peggy Anderson, Children’s Hospital (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 168.77. Ibid., 385.78. Ibid., 296.79. Anon., “Our Child Walks in the Valley of the Shadow,” Parents Magazine, 1952, 27,

38–39.80. Ibid., 59.


released from the sufferings of the world, a world that he can now seebut from which he has been separated. Then he will move off andreturn to God.”81 More than four decades after parents began writingto John and Frances Gunther about their children’s deaths, the powerof prayer, the afterlife, and God’s ability to erase suffering throughdeath, these themes appeared in strikingly similar language in novelsand memoirs.

For some parents, the period surrounding and following the deathof their children represented a sacred time, suggesting that spiritualease was yet another layer of the experience and one that, like otherspiritual matters, would never be recorded in medical records. DavidMorrell’s book Fireflies (1988) presented a semi-fictionalized accountof his fifteen-year-old son’s death from Ewing’s Sarcoma. Like DonWanderhope in The Blood of the Lamb, the father is skeptical aboutreligion: “I’m not sure about such ultimate matters as an afterlife andGod. Not sure but not unsure either. Straddling the fence. Let’s waitand see. God could exist. Maybe not.”82 Yet on the day of his son’sfuneral, he offers a detailed description of a dove in the mausoleum,which he interprets as a spiritual sign.83 Former first lady BarbaraBush’s 1994 account of the death of her three-year-old daughterRobin from leukemia in 1953 frames the death in religious rhetoricthat echoed the language of nineteenth-century consolation litera-ture: “One moment she was there and the next she was gone. I trulyfelt her soul go out of that beautiful little body. . . . I never felt thepresence of God more strongly than at that moment.”84 When Carolin The Blood of the Lamb dies, her father perceives himself as standing“on holy ground.”85

In the late twentieth century, as throughout the nineteenth cen-tury, the death of offspring could threaten as well as intensify religiousbeliefs. Elaine Ipswitch had been brought up “as a Christian believingin God and in Jesus, believing what I read in the Bible. I trulybelieved that if you really wanted something, all you had to do wasask.”86 The diagnosis of her ten-year-old son Scott with stage-four

81. Ibid.82. David Morrell, Fireflies (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1988), 193.83. Ibid., 42–46.84. Barbara Bush, A Memoir (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), 44.85. De Vries, Blood of the Lamb, 236.86. Elaine Ipswitch, Scott Was Here (New York: Dell Publishing, 1978), 31–32.


Hodgkin’s disease “tested” her faith “as it had never been before.I just could not make myself accept the idea that Scott’s death wasGod’s will.”87 When a friend suggested she read the Book of Job,she became more frightened than before. One sliver of comfort camefrom the Hebrew Bible, where she read, “Now faith in the substanceof things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”88 As Scott’scondition steadily deteriorated, she began to wonder why God hadchosen to heal some patients but not her son. Still clinging to thebelief in the possibility of divine intervention, she took the boy to afaith healer.89 When that visit had no effect, she continued to pray.After Scott had battled the disease for five-and-a-half years, a physi-cian told Ipswitch that the end was near and asked if she wanted theboy to be placed on a heart machine. Finally realizing that God didnot want to perform a miracle and completely heal Scott, she decidedto “let him go.”90 After his death, her “faith in God was even moreseverely shaken than it had been during his illness. I still prayed. Iasked God to cherish my son in heaven. But there were days andnights when I was swept by storms, by doubts, by anger.”91 When sheread a poem Scott had written shortly before his death, testifying tohis faith in God, her doubts dissolved, and she again was able to findsome comfort in the religion of her childhood.92

These individual accounts of children’s deaths mirror the letters tothe Gunthers in the breadth of their remarks about religion and death.They provide compelling accounts of medical care when cure wasunlikely and rich descriptions of how patients and parents coped in sit-uations that ultimately became hopeless. Although anecdotal andsometimes fictional and written by a highly literate and largely Euro-American group, they deepen our understanding of both modernmedicine and patienthood.

INTEGRATING MEDICAL HISTORY AND RELIGION

Medicine and religion search for two very different types of meaning.As historian Thomas R. Cole writes, “The scientific questions about

87. Ibid., 32.88. Ibid., 36.89. Ibid., 146.90. Ibid., 229.91. Ibid., 234–35.92. Ibid., 235–36.


meaning are part of the human attempt to develop logical, reliable,interpretable and systematically predictive theories. The existentialquestions about meaning are a part of the human quest for a visionwithin which one’s experience makes sense.”93 To the twentieth-century parents whose accounts we have examined, death was notonly a problem medical science sought to avert, but also a mystery,raising existential issues and requiring religious and spiritualresources. Medical historians seeking to understand fully the patient’sexperience of illness as well as how patients and families understoodboth the delivery of medical care and the cultural authority of medi-cal science must integrate an understanding of religious experiencesand faith into their work.

Finally, it is worth pondering why, if personal accounts and recentacademic studies demonstrate that religious beliefs infuse the experi-ence of many dying children and their families, this topic has receivedso little attention from medical historians. One reason may be thathistorians of medicine, albeit with many exceptions, are uncomfort-able investigating and writing about faith, which they regard as apersonal matter and a “variable” that is difficult to analyze. Schultzand Harvey note in their article on American religious history andhistoriography, “as secular intellectuals moved into the Ivory Tower,they brought with them a distrust, antipathy and/or ignorance ofreligion and religiosity.”94 Another explanation is specific to the disci-pline of medical history, where research comes largely from medicalarchives and medical literature. Here the sources, especially in the lat-ter half of the twentieth century, are focused on efforts to preventillness and suffering, to cure disease, and to record treatments—inshort to prevent death. While visits by social workers and chaplainsmay be noted in patient records, extensive narrative accounts of thesevisits and conversations are not recorded. Even within the medicalliterature that acknowledges the experiences of dying children andtheir families, the focus is on psychosocial supports rather than reli-gious ones.95 These personal and evidentiary limitations and the

93. Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), vxiii.

94. Schultz and Harvey, “American Religious History and Historiography,” 133.95. See Dorothy Judd, Give Sorrow Words: Working with a Dying Child (London: Free

Association Books, 1989). Judd, a Kleinian psychotherapist in London, discusses the litera-ture addressing the psychological needs of dying children and their parents which began to


tendency to regard experiences of death as best explored by social sci-entists must be challenged if we are to understand fully the patient’sexperience of illness and how patients and families understood andexperienced the delivery of medical care.

By integrating our analysis of the cultural authority of medical sci-ence with an equally deep understanding of the cultural power of reli-gious faith, we open up new pathways in modern American medicalhistory. Topics needing closer attention from medical historiansinclude the role of bio-ethicists and chaplains and the role of religionin discussions of the expanding range of end-of-life care choices.Finally, we should compare the religious experiences we observed indescriptions of children’s death with those recounted in descriptionsof the loss of elderly relatives and other family members.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors wish to thank Chris Crenner, Eric Schneider, DavidHarrington Watt, John Wall, Jacqueline Wolf, and the members ofthe PACHS history of medicine working group for their commentson earlier drafts.

FUNDING

None.

develop in the 1980s. The psychological literature is enormous and there are numerous bibli-ographies. See, for example, Benson, ed., The Dying Child.


Documents

Modern Medical Science and the Divine Province of God