This question “what if health were catching?” caught my attention because of a recent Kansas newspaper article reporting increased hospital visitor scrutiny to prevent the spread of flu. More than just a passing thought, Bob Cummings expectation of health was put to a practical test. The beginning of the article is below but you will need to click the link at the end to find out about Bob’s flu encounter. I will add that for many years I have responded to “Don’t get too close, I have the flu” with “I can’t catch anything but good from you” and I have found that statement to be true. Now I need to add the expectation that they will catch my health!
Is it reasonable to consider a good thing as contagious? Isn’t it widely accepted, for example, that laughter can be infectious?
What would be the beneficial implications of viewing health as catching?
For one thing, instead of viewing health as fragile, we could find a sturdier sense of health — that is, health that is not just the absence of disease or infirmity, as pointed out by the World Health Organization’s definition of health.
Unfortunately, they can also make us fearful.
Back when Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of WHO, was addressing the Ebola outbreak, she said that fear is spreading faster than the virus. And early last year, discussing the Zika virus, she said: “The level of alarm is extremely high.”
Tackling fear is important.
Health reformer Mary Baker Eddy said: “People believe in infectious and contagious diseases, and that any one is liable to have them under certain predisposing or exciting causes. This mental state prepares one to have any disease whenever there appear the circumstances which he believes produce it. If he believed as sincerely that health is catching when exposed to contact with healthy people, he would catch their state of feeling quite as surely and with better effect than he does the sick man’s.”
All of this makes me think of an example from the Bible in which Jesus touched a leper. Instead of Jesus catching leprosy, the leper was cured (KJV Matthew 8:2-3).
Could that touch have been an assertion of a different view of what health is and where it comes from — an assertion that the source of health is superior to the source of disease?
There is a biblical basis for this idea: “… the Lord God omnipotent reigneth” and “… I will restore health unto thee … saith the Lord …” (Revelation 19:6, Jeremiah 30:17).