Faith & Spirit Quote by Walter Martin

Medicine’s triumph is framed here as a moral hazard: the more brilliantly it fixes bodies, the easier it is to forget what it’s for. Coming from Walter Martin, a clergyman writing in the late 20th century, the line carries pastoral anxiety about a profession sliding from vocation into industry. “Success…in a material way” doesn’t just mean better drugs, cleaner surgeries, longer lifespans. It gestures toward the measurable, billable, technologized wins that modern health care loves because they can be counted, marketed, standardized, and scaled.

The sting is in “threaten the soul.” Martin isn’t arguing against progress; he’s warning about a quiet displacement of values. When cure becomes the dominant narrative, care can start to look like an inefficient add-on. Patients become cases, time becomes throughput, and suffering becomes a technical problem to be solved rather than a human experience to be accompanied. The subtext is theological but not narrowly religious: he’s talking about dignity, presence, humility, and the limits of mastery.

Context matters: Martin’s era saw medicine’s explosive postwar ascent alongside growing institutional power - hospitals, insurance, specialization, and the early architecture of today’s health-care economy. His phrase “may now” suggests a turning point, not a timeless lament. The line works because it admits the seduction: success itself is the pressure. It’s a warning that the profession can win the war against disease and still lose its guiding ethic, trading bedside responsibility for laboratory certainty, and compassion for confidence.