Did the Christian Church Help or Hinder Medical progress?

Answer 1

Helped:

For example, the Puritans believed that the book of nature agreed with revealed religion. For the Puritan, creation was God's other book, besides scripture, and it too was worth the most intensive study. Increase Mather articulated their view succinctly: "the [natural] Works of God have a voice in them, as well as his Word."[1] Increase Mather was one of the first to write a book on comets. He observed comets with the telescope brought to Harvard in 1663 by a member of the Royal Society (a scientific organization founded mostly by Puritans which gave us Isaac newton). That young scientist was John Winthrop Jr. This Winthrop was the son of the determined founding governor of the Puritan "Bible Commonwealth" of Massachusetts and was himself a long-serving governor of the equally Puritan Connecticut. He was also one of the most distinguished New England scientists. The Royal Society named him a member and published some of his observations of animals and fauna.[2]

Another Royal Society member, Cotton Mather was a scientist-a scientist precisely because he was a Puritan minister. Besides experimenting with inoculations against small pox, he studied "little eels" through his microscope and Halley's comet through the Harvard telescope. These acts of scientific observation were "acts of devotion themselves, giving new grounds for praising the Almighty by enhancing his sense of the perfect order of things."[3]

For his mind there was no contradiction between working for social justice and spending two or perhaps three days a week in secret fasts; no conflict between hailing Copernicus and Newton and preaching the imminence of the millennium, now that the seven last plagues of the Vial are about to be poured out on the Papal Empire; no conflict between studying the Talmud and preaching the Covenant of Grace.[4]

This fundamental orientation enabled Puritans to hold simultaneously to a belief in miracles and a bent toward science, a belief in predestination and the need for "means" in mission. They were, in a word, holistic. The Puritans never dreamed that the truth of scripture was to be embraced despite the evidences of reason or science.[5]The Copernican theory gained early acceptance in New England. The unity of all truth, both revealed and empirical, was as much a Puritan basic conviction as it had been in thirteenth-century Paris.[6]

[1] Increase Mather, The Latter Sign Discoursed of. Boston, 1682; according to Stout, The New England Soul, 102. "One of the classic assumptions of the Puritan mind was that the will of God was to be discerned in nature as well as in revelation." (Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind, 5.)

[2] Thomas J. Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy: The Founding of American Civilization (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947), 261-62.

[3] Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 42.

[4] David Levin, "Introduction" to Bonifacius: An Essay Upon the Good by Cotton Mather, xxvi.

[5] Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, The Puritans (New York: American Book Company, 1938), 4.

[6] Perry Miller, The Seventeenth Century, 107. "All Puritans were once more confident of what the fifteenth century had brought into question, that natural and revealed religion agreed, that belief and an adequate degree of understanding could be reconciled together." (Miller, The Seventeenth Century, 102.)