“Developments in the twentieth century turned attention away from these consolations of religion for the parents of gravely ill children. Massive public health campaigns during the first half of the century largely dropped nineteenth-century religious rhetoric to emphasize how childhood deaths were preventable through voluntary human action. Talk of God’s will was replaced by talk of proper medical and hygienic interventions. Public health nurses and doctors increasingly viewed acceptance of God’s will not as an important spiritual goal but rather as a sign of fatalism, inadequate willpower, or a failure to appreciate the benefits of modern medicine.”
— Janet Golden and Emily K. Abel, “Modern Medical Science
and the Divine Providence of God: Rethinking the Place of Religion in
Postwar U.S. Medical History” (2014)
Published
A Middleground 