edicine by Church ordinance practically shut out all the
clerics, that is, all the educated men of the medieval period, from
the medical profession. Any such idea, however, could only have
occurred to one who does not realize that at any given time there are
only a comparatively few religious and a great many secular clergymen.
Practically all those who could read and write in the Middle Ages were
known as clerks, that is clerics, and were under the protection of the
Church, most of them indeed receiving minor orders, and if all the
clergy were to have been excluded {428} from the medical profession
this contention would be true. So far is it from the truth, however,
that a number of the great physicians and surgeons of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries belonged to the clerical orders, not a few of
them were priests and some of the greatest of them, like Theodoric,
were actually bishops. It was only the religious, that is the men who
had specially devoted their lives to monasticism, who were forbidden
to take up the study of medicine because it did not comport with their
monastic vocation.

A second series of ecclesiastical decrees that are often referred to
in the history of medicine are those which concern the relations of
the physician and his patient whenever there is danger of death. The
Church's duty was to secure the proper dispositions on the part of
those who were in danger of death. Physicians sometimes did not let
patients and their friends know how serious the illness was and as a
consequence patients died without the sacraments and rites of the
Church. In order to prevent this the Church regulation was promulgated
that a physician was bound to have a patient take care of his soul at
the same time that his body was being treated. Physicians of the
present day, even when they are not themselves Catholics, know how
much of good, even physical good, is done to patients almost without
exception by the consolations of religion. Instead of being perturbed
as is sometimes thought by those who have not had experience with the
custom, exactly the opposite effect is produced, and patients often
drop their anxieties and solicitudes and begin to improve immediately
after the reception of the sacraments. They usually submit themselves
to whatever Providence has in store for them, put off their worries,
and this factor of itself is eminently therapeutic.

Many a non-Catholic physician obeys these decrees of the Chu