266. The Great Physician

The Story Behind the Hymn

William Hunter, an Irish-born Methodist minister who had emigrated to America as a child, wrote "The Great Physician" in the years before the Civil War, publishing it under the title "Christ the Physician" in his 1859 collection Songs of Devotion, originally in seven full stanzas. By 1859 Hunter was an established figure in Methodist publishing, having edited both the Conference Journal and the Christian Advocate before his appointment as Professor of Hebrew at Allegheny College.

One frequently repeated account ties the hymn's imagery to a specific real event: a serious mid-century railway accident in which a number of passengers were killed, and many more would have died had several doctors not happened to be riding on the same train, able to give immediate medical care. Whether or not that particular incident was Hunter's direct inspiration, the hymn's central image — Christ as the physician who arrives exactly when needed, with power no ordinary doctor has, to heal not the body but the "drooping heart" — draws on a title for Christ already old by Hunter's time, rooted in Jesus' own words in Mark 2:17, "They that be whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick."

John H. Stockton, later also responsible for the tune to "Down at the Cross," set Hunter's words to music, giving the hymn the refrain that has stayed most firmly in memory — "sweetest note in seraph song, sweetest name on mortal tongue" — three parallel claims of superlative sweetness, all of them resolving to the same single word: Jesus.

Both Hunter and Stockton died within months of each other in 1877, but the hymn they wrote nearly two decades before has remained a steady presence in evangelical hymnals ever since, still carrying its nineteenth-century title for Christ into congregations who may never have heard the railway story behind it.