urgery to
develop during the Middle Ages, it is a deduction that has been made
from certain supposed principles, and not an induction from the actual
facts as we know them. Such historians would be the first to emphasize
the narrowness of the schoolmen for their supposed dependence on
deduction, but what they have to say on medical history is entirely
deductive, and unfortunately from premises that will not stand in the
presence of the story of the wonderful rise and development of medical
science and medical education, mainly under the patronage of
ecclesiastics, in the Middle Ages.

The argument may be stated formally with perfect fairness as follows:
When men believe in miracles they cannot build up scientific medicine
and surgery; but men believed in miracles in the Middle Ages,
therefore they did not build up scientific medicine and surgery. When
stated thus baldly in formal scholastic form, the argument loses most
of the glamor that has been thrown around it. This is one of the
advantages of the old scholastic method--it strips argument to its
naked significance. Logic asserts herself and rhetoric loses its
force.

With regard to the major premise that when men believe in miracles
they will not successfully pursue investigations in the medical
science, there are two answers. One of these concerns the actual
attitude of mind towards scientific medicine of men who believe in
miracles, for we have such men still with us, and have always had them
all during the past seven centuries. The other portion of the answer
concerns what men who were distinguished scientific investigators
thought of {201} miracles, and how much they accomplished for the
medical sciences while all the time maintaining their belief in the
possibility of miraculous intervention for the cure of disease.

Apparently the writers who insist on the incompatibility of the belief
in miracles with devotion to scientific medicine do not realize that
the greater number of thinking physicians during the last seven
centuries, and quite down to our own day, have been ready to confess
their belief in the possibility of miraculous healing, yet have tried
to do everything in their power to relieve suffering and cure human
ills by the natural means at their command. Their attitude has been
very much that attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, who said to the
members of his order: "Do everything that you can with the idea that
everything depends on you, and then hop