neglected during the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. The existence of this tradition, and its
acceptance by men who had no idea that they were being influenced by
that peculiar state of mind which considers that nothing good can come
out of the Nazareth of the times before the reformation so-called, is
of itself a warning with regard to the way history has been written,
especially for the Teutonic and English-speaking peoples, that should
carry weight in other departments of history beside medicine and
surgery.

Even Pagel could not get entirely away from the old tradition which
has existed for so long, that the Church, if she did not oppose, at
least hampered the progress of surgery. While his first paragraph
shows that he recognized the important advances that were made in the
Middle Ages, he cannot rid himself of the prejudice that has existed
so long and has tinged so much of the historical writing of the last
four centuries. He furnishes an abundance of material himself to
disprove the old opinion, and evidently has been influenced by this
evidence, but cannot give up notions that have been part and parcel of
his education from his earliest days in Protestant Germany. He says:--

"A set-back must also be recognized to some extent in surgery,
especially attributable to the fact that as a consequence of the
pressure of the Church upon scientific medicine, the representatives
of medical {191} science felt themselves bound to neglect the
practical art of surgical operation. Church regulations forbade the
shedding of blood to churchmen, and not a few physicians were more
than inclined to accept this prohibition as in accordance with their
own feelings. For this reason the practice of surgery was left for
the most part to the lower orders of those engaged in healing. This
went to such an extent, that physicians even came to look upon
surgery as an unworthy occupation. Even venesection, which was so
commonly employed and which came to be indispensable to the practice
of internal medicine, made it necessary to call for the services of
a barber-surgeon."

As we shall see, there were many other and much more important factors
at work in the degradation of surgery than the supposed repression of
the Church. The time to which Pagel refers is in the earlier centuries
of the Middle Ages, and not the later ones; yet it is from these later
centuries that the supposed prohibitory decrees are all