"The Healing Team"

Ground was broken last week for a new concept of healing that shows signs of becoming a major trend: training doctors in religion and ministers in medicine. In Houston, Texas, work began on a four-story, $600,000 building to house the Texas Medical Center's Institute of Religion --the first of its kind in the country.

Since World War II, more and more medical schools (including the University of Chicago's) have cooperated in training ministers in hospital procedure; more and more seminaries (including the Episcopalians' General Theological Seminary in Manhattan) have stressed chaplain service to the sick. Four years ago, Texas Medical Center began training doctors in the minister's role on "the healing team," stressing the relation of religion to a patient's health. Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergymen lectured to the medical students on the details of their faiths so that the future doctors might collaborate in aiding the spiritual as well as the mental and physical health of their patients. The following year a course was added for ministerial graduate students in which they study medicine, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, watch operations, and spend five to seven hours a day as chaplain-interns, counseling the sick and their families under strict supervision.

"We call it spiritual therapy," says the Institute of Religion's director, Methodist Minister Dawson Bryan. "You can separate hydrogen from water, but then you haven't got water any more. For years doctors have been treating man's mental and physical ailments, but have been ignoring the spiritual part of him. You can't separate these entirely without destroying the whole person."

The program has been a significant success; 139 medical students, 373 nursing students, 80 graduate ministerial students and 112 pastors have been trained by the institute so far, and the new building, scheduled for completion next fall, is expected to increase enrollment. Part of the structure will be a large out-patient clinic to which ambulatory patients can come for counseling. Among the institute's case histories that underline the need for such counseling is the story of a middle-aged man, now making a good recovery from major surgery, who was sinking fast until a chaplain-intern persuaded him that he still had much to live for. "Every person's life is vitally affected by his faith and religion," says Dr. Bryan. "The institute trains the health team to understand and use these spiritual resources."

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