1974: An Inquiry into the Relative Efficacy of Medicine, Religion, and Other Confidence Tricks
By Charlataine Mallard
They have been comparing pills with prayers again. An impolite pastime, like asking one’s grandmother to explain her lover’s technique; no one involved emerges unflustered. Yet the faculty insists on “controlled trials.” I tell them, “Gentlemen, nothing is ever truly controlled until it refuses to respond.”
I have observed, through many well‑funded sittings in pale hospitals, that medicine’s chief success is aesthetic: white coats, clean edges, the hypnotic shine of authority. When my late aunt Belinda succumbed to what her doctors termed “a complicated enthusiasm of the blood,” they placed her beneath a vast chrome apparatus that whirred most convincingly. She died in perfect synchronisation with the machine’s final sigh, which proved, I think, an admirable sense of timing.
Religion offers the same polish, only scented. Incense is chloroform for the soul. One enters the pew as one might a fainting couch, expecting redemption or at least a brief lift in one’s posture. I have, in moments of fieldwork, genuflected experimentally in five faiths and a Reform Club luncheon. The chief variable is the food; otherwise, one feels the same mixture of guilt, performance, and faint relief at belonging to something sufficiently larger and cleaner than oneself.
My colleague Dr. Biswas published a paper last spring—“The Placebo as Social Contract”—arguing that all healing, spiritual or chemical, depends upon the patient’s enthusiasm for the story being told. He quoted (a little too smugly, I thought) an early medical text from 1927 which declared: “The cure begins when the prescription sounds expensive.” Naturally, I underwrote the journal for a decade after that line; one must reward literature wherever it blushes into science.
Of course, the philosophers protested. They always do. They announced a conference titled Faith and Molecules: Ontological Disputes in the Clinic. It was well‑attended, perhaps because the doctor in charge mixed gin with the communion wine as a demonstration. Reports vary, but one participant was last seen proposing marriage to an intravenous stand.
There is a story—one cannot confirm, as gossip is its own measurement—that in 1958 a surgeon in Prague removed a tumour using only Gregorian chant and a single spoon. The patient, a librarian, later became an atheist with perfect posture. By contrast, a rival experiment in Geneva employed twelve priests, three hypnotherapists, and a moth‑eaten bear costume to similar success. Both papers were retracted, not because the results were impossible, but because they were unfashionable.
Medicine practices its magic with microscopes; religion with symbols; both tremble before the mirror of their self‑importance. I once suggested, during a Vatican lecture (uninvited but flawlessly dressed), that saints and surgeons are alike in preferring an audience to a result. A bishop stiffened; a nurse applauded politely; both then fainted, proving my thesis without requiring my consent.
My Parisian friend Clotilde, a psychoanalyst with a fondness for gold lamé and Viennese case histories, maintains that confidence tricks are simply healings conducted without uniforms. “You pay the hypnotist or the priest or the medic,” she told me over oysters, “because you wish to purchase your own gullibility back, la vérité de luxe.” We toasted to that—a fine, slightly saline toast—and agreed that no truth survives unless it flatters the teller.
I confess a minor professional weakness: I collect placebo effects. Leftover bottles, discarded amulets, faded spiritual newsletters, all promising vitality through belief. On my writing desk rests one exquisite example: a pink tablet in a velvet box, prescribed in 1931 to a countess who later claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in her own X‑ray. The radiologist’s note simply reads: “Subject reports theological improvement.”
History is quite firm that the first confidence trick was love itself. The second was homeopathy, which proves far longer lasting. I own a first edition of Dr. Partridge’s Water That Remembers Better Than Its Patients (1799), in which he recounts curing fevers by allowing rain to “overhear” the names of medicines. Scholars scoff, but thunderstorms have always struck me as moody and thus suggestible.
I must acknowledge, however, that my inquiries are entirely circular. Each time I determine that medicine triumphs over religion (sterility being more persuasive than sanctity), some kindly nun performs triage with nothing but compassion and string, and outperforms the hospital. Each time I declare faith superior, an antibiotic saunters in and ruins the mysticism. I suspect the competition is rigged by human hope, which plays both sides for the sheer joy of believing.
A recent patient—myself—provides the final test. Last winter, following an inconvenient collapse at the ballet, I awoke surrounded by physicians so alarmed they forgot to bill me. I felt positively holy. When I asked one if I would live, he replied, “If that’s what you’ve decided,” proving the point of all my research: efficacy depends on narrative consent. A god or a doctor can only complete half the sentence; the rest is pronunciation.
And so, dear colleagues, I propose the following: that medicine and religion are two dialects of the same fluent delusion—the belief that someone else knows what your body or soul requires. All systems of care rely upon persuasion. Even the most skeptical patient still kneels, somewhere in the mind, to the altar of perhaps.
It is therefore my duty—as a gentleman of means and an amateur empiricist of moods—to fund both sides indefinitely. A cathedral for bacteriologists; a clinic for confessors. We shall test prayer against penicillin, incense against antiseptic, confession against chemotherapy, until both collapse graciously from exhaustion.
If nothing else, the reports will be marvellous reading.
Extract from the forthcoming “Transactions of the Society for Benevolent Absurdism,” Vol. III, Spring 1974.
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