Tenrikyo-Ofudesaki - Osashizu October 17th 1893
That doctors and medicine are not necessary is not my teaching. Being given up by doctors is like being thrown away. The foundation of my teaching is to save these sufferers. Understand me well.
It is perhaps helpful to recall that at the time that these poems were written most health issues and troubles of any sort were considered to be a family affair to be taken care of at home. Prior to the discovery of antibiotics and vaccines many of the illnesses and injuries that are routinely dealt with by medicine today would have had an outcome that depended entirely upon the immune systems ability to fight infection.
It has always been the case that some people recover from illness, injury and troubles while some don't. The question that has captured the human imagination from the very beginning of our species is to ask why this was so. Asking "Why is this happening?" and "what can I do to get relief?" are questions that naturally occurr to imaginations that do not know and understand the truth of their origin. Pondering the journey of our species we find that in every culture no matter when, or where there have always been imaginations that have stepped up and provided answers to those questions. Many of those imagined answers remain as potent as ever and provide many less powerful imaginations with the foundations for a wide variety of imagined truths of the world.
Based on their experience medical doctors and spiritual practitioners were often only in a position to make an educated guess as to who would survive and who would be "given up on". Often with the diagnosis that ultimately the patient was in the hands of God, or gods, saints, spirits and the like. Not a good situation to be in particularly if, like Miki Nakayama prior to awakening, you were suffering under truths of your world that you were being picked on and extorted by gods, and spirits, causal agents who you were powerless against. For many if not most people at the time, that was just the way it was.
Note that the emphasis above is on "suffering", which is a state of mind. The state of our mind either "clear" or "muddy" being the subject of this teaching after all.