ties just at this time to regulate the practice of medicine.
Great abuses had crept in. Almost anyone who wished could set up as a
physician, and those who were least fitted were often best able to
secure a large number of patients by their cleverness, their knowledge
of men, and their smooth tongues. The bishops of various dioceses met,
and issued decrees forbidding anyone from practising medicine unless he
was a graduate of the medical school of the neighboring University of
Montpellier. After a time it was found that the greatest number of
violators of these decrees were Jews. Accordingly special regulations
were made against them. They happen to be ecclesiastical regulations,
because no other authority at that time claimed the right to regulate
medical education and the practice of medicine.

What is sure is that many Jewish physicians reached distinction under
Christian as well as Arabian rulers at all times during the Middle Ages.
It would be quite impossible in the limited space at command here to
give any adequate mention of what was accomplished by these Jewish
physicians, whose names we have scarcely been able to more than
catalogue, nor of the place they hold in their times. As the physicians
of rulers, their influence for culture and the cultivation of science
was extensive, and as a rule they stood for what was best and highest in
education. The story of one of them, who is generally known in the
Christian world at least, Maimonides, given in some detail, may serve as
a type of these Jewish physicians of the Middle Ages. He lived just
before the flourishing period of university life in the thirteenth
century brought about that wonderful development of medicine and surgery
in the west of Europe that meant so much for the final centuries of the
Middle Ages. His works influenced not a little the great thinkers and
teachers whose own writings were to be the foundations of education for
several centuries after their time. Maimonides was well known in the
Western universities. Though his life had been mainly spent in the East,
and he died there, there was scarcely a distinguished scholar of Europe
who was not acquainted directly or indirectly with his works, and the
greater the reputation of the scholar, as a rule, the more he knew of
Maimonides, Moses AEgyptaeus, as he was called, and the more frequently he
referred to his writings.

IV

MAIMONIDES

The life of one of the great Jewish physicians, who