e priesthood of that great and then dominant
Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was
this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and
file of the great body of the people through the open channels of
the Roman Catholic priesthood."

{517}

The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance
of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the
policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he
interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines."
Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical
schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose
professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have
come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of
medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's
own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American
medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any
preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded
lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two
years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine.
In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having
completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate
department, and then he was required to give four years to the study
of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician
before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to
which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the
beginning of the twentieth century--a full generation after Draper's
time.

We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical
teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise
medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books
and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in
Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had
trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was
only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time
were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to
our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most
discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean
hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under