FAITH HEALER

Noted Surgeon and Author Paul Brand Dies at Age 89: Connected his pioneering work with leprosy and his missionary faith. (Christianity Today, 07/10/2003)

Paul Wilson Brand, the pioneering missionary surgeon who wrote a series of books connecting the Christian faith and medicine, died Tuesday after several weeks in a coma following a fall in his Seattle home.

Born to missionary parents in the mountains of southwestern India in 1914, Brand attended London University, where he met his wife, Margaret Berry. The two surgeons returned to Vellore, India, to teach at the Christian Medical College and Hospital.

While working as the school's first professor of orthopaedics and hand research, Brand pioneered surgical work with those suffering from Hansen's disease, a bacterial infection more commonly known as leprosy. He was the first surgeon to use reconstructive surgery to correct deformities caused by the disease in the hands and feet, and developed many other forms of prevention and healing from the disease.

Before Brand, it was widely believed that those suffering from Hansen's Disease lost their fingers and feet because of rotting flesh. Instead, Brand discovered, such deformities were due to the loss of ability to feel pain. With treatment and care, he showed, victims of the disease could go indefinitely without such deformities. [...]

Many will remember Brand as mentor to Christianity Today Editor at Large Philip Yancey. The two men wrote several books together, including In His Image, Fearfully and Wonderfully Made, and The Gift of Pain.

"I see the world largely through his eyes," Yancey said. "My father died just after my first birthday, and in so many ways Dr. Brand became a father figure to me in the best way. I have never known anyone more brilliant, nor anyone more humble.

"I have written often of bad doses of the faith I got here and there. Truly, I believe that God brought Paul Brand into my life so that I could take all the time in the world to examine one human being and learn what God had in mind with the whole creation experiment. No one has affected my faith more. You need only meet one saint to believe, and I had the inestimable privilege of spending leisurely hours on visits, trips, and phone conversations picking apart a saint piece by piece. He stood up to scrutiny."

INTERVIEW: God's Astounding Laws of Nature: "I like to think of God as developing his skills," said Dr. Paul Brand. (Philip Yancey, December 1, 1978, Christianity Today)

[Q:] Let's talk for a moment about your concept of omnipotence. As I understand it, you view omnipotence in terms of the potential power, not the process it describes. For example, I can describe a Russian weightlifter as the most powerful man in the world. But his task of lifting the weights he attempts is not easier for him than lifting the weights that challenge me; he still has to grunt and sweat and exert. Is there an analogy there to the way you interpret God's omnipotence?

[A:] There may be. I don't even like the word omnipotence. The word conveys a simplistic view of the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, as if he merely had to wave a magic wand and it all came into being. Man's creative effort in producing the Sistine Chapel or the lunar lander required tremendous planning and forethought, and I can envision God going through a similar process of planning and experimentation in his act of creation. The more I delve into the natural laws-the atom, the universe, the solid elements, molecules, the sun, and, even more, the interplay of all the mechanisms required to sustain life-I am astounded. The whole creation could collapse like a deck of cards if just one of those factors were removed. To build a thing like our universe had to require planning and thought, and that, I believe, is the strongest argument for the presence of God in creation.

From the chance collision of molecules you may sometimes derive a sudden, exciting pattern, but it quickly disperses. Some people really think that all the design and precision in nature came by chance, that if millions of molecules bombard each other for long enough, a nerve cell and sensory ending at exactly the right threshold will be bound to turn up. To those people I merely suggest that they try to make one, as I did, and see what chance is up against.

I see God as a careful, patient designer, and I don't think that the fact that I call him God makes it easy. There are billions of possibilities of ways in which atoms could combine, and he had to discard all but a very few as being inadequate. I don't think I can fully appreciate God unless I use the word difficult to describe the creative process.

I like to think of God developing his skills, as it were, by creating amoebae and then ants and cockroaches, developing complexity until he comes to people, the zenith of creation. Again, he was confronted with options at every decision. A person who breaks his leg skiing could wish for stronger bones. Perhaps bone could have been made stronger (though scientists have not been able to find a stronger, suitable substance for implanting) but he would have then made the bones thicker and heavier. If it were heavier you probably wouldn't be able to ski, because you would be too bulky and inert.

Take a model of the human skeleton and look at the tiny size of the bones in the fingers and toes. Those bones in the toes support all your weight. If they were larger and thicker, many athletic events would be impossible. If fingers were thicker, so many human activities-such as playing stringed instruments-would be impossible. The Creator had to make those difficult choices between strength and mobility and weight and volume.

[Q:] And animals were given different qualities, based on their needs. Some are stronger and faster than man, and can see and hear better.

[A:] Right, you can only call creation perfect in relation to other options available. Even human types differ. Is an American better than a Vietnamese? The American is bigger, but it takes more food to sustain him. If food becomes short, the Vietnamese will survive because they can get by on a bowl of rice and the Americans will die out. So physical qualities are not good or bad but good in certain circumstances. I have tremendous admiration for the balance by which the world has come out with evidence of thought behind it. But every stage of development-moving from the inanimate to the animate, single-cell to multi-cell, developing the nervous system-required thought and choice. That's why I define omnipotence the way I do.

[Q:] When you speak of pain, and even death, you seem to include these within God's overall design for this planet. These are generally seen as evidence of the twisted, or fallen, state of the world. How do you reconcile these elements with your belief in a wise, loving Creator?

[A:] I cannot easily imagine life on this planet without pain and death. Pain is a helpful, essential mechanism for survival. I could walk with you through the corridors of this leprosarium and show you what life is like for people who feel little pain. I see patients who have lost all their toes simply because they wore tight, ill-fitting shoes that caused pressure and cut off circulation. You or I would have stopped wearing those shoes or adjusted our way of walking. But these patients didn't have the luxury of pain to warn them when they were abusing their flesh.

You're familiar with the stereotyped image of leprosy, with its loss of fingers. That abuse comes because the leprosy bacillus destroys pain cells, and the patients are no longer warned when they harm their bodies through normal activity. On this world, given our material environment, I would not for a moment wish for a pain-free life. It would be miserable. I mentioned earlier that 99 of 100 hands are perfectly normal. The statistics are exactly reversed for those people insensitive to pain: Nineteen of each twenty of them have some sort of malformity or dysfunction, simply because their pain system is not working properly.

As for death, when I look at the world of nature, its most impressive feature as a closed system is the lavish expenditure of life at every level. Every time a whale takes a mouthful he swallows a million plankton. Every garden pond is a scene of constant sacrifice of life for the building up of other life. Death is not some evil intruder who has upset beautiful creation; it is woven into the very fabric and essence of the beautiful creation itself. Most of the higher animals are designed so that they depend for their survival on the death of lower levels of life. Having created this food pyramid, and placed man at its apex, the Creator instructed him to enjoy and to use it all responsibly. In modern, Western culture, we tend to see a certain ruthlessness and lack of love in nature, but I believe that viewpoint comes from a civilization whose main contact with animal life is through domestic pets and children's anthropomorphic animal stories.

[Q:] Just a minute, now. It is true that pain and death fit into the present system of life on earth, but weren't these factors introduced as a result of man's rebellion and fall? Are you saying that the Garden of Eden contained pain and death?

[A:] Well, anything I say about the Garden of Eden must be conjecture, because we've been given very little data about it. I feel reasonably sure that Adam felt pain, if his body was like mine. If there were sharp rocks on which he could have hurt himself, I hope he had a pain system to warn him. The pain network is so inextricably tied to the functions of the body-it tells you when to go to the bathroom, how close you may go to the fire, and carries feelings of pleasure as well as pain-that I could not imagine a worthwhile body in this world without it.

And I believe physical death was present before the fall also. The very nature of the chain of life requires it. You cannot have soil without the death of bacteria; you couldn't have thrushes without the death of worms. The shape of a tiger's teeth are wholly inappropriate for eating plant matter (and even vegetarians thrive off the death of plants, part of the created order). A vulture would not survive unless something died. I don't see death as being a bad thing at all.

According to Texas Tech's Michael Dini, and many of those who commented on that controversy, Paul Wilson Brand should have been incapable, because of his beliefs, of being a good physician, never mind a great one. They are though wisely silent about the saintliness of such men.

MORE:
The Scars of Easter: He knows the wounds of humanity. His hands prove it. (Paul Brand with Philip Yancey, 4/18/00, Christianity Today) Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2003 8:32 PM