the beloved physician." In a very scholarly book published by the
Dublin University Press in 1882, the Rev. W. K. Hobart, LL.D., shows
that St. Luke was acquainted with the technical medical terms of the
Greek medical writers. St. Luke was an Asiatic Greek. Dr. Hobart writes:
"Finally, it should not be left out of account that, in any illness from
which he might be suffering, there was no one to whom St. Paul would be
likely to apply with such confidence as to St. Luke, for it is probable
that, in the whole extent of the Roman Empire, the only Christian
physician at this time was St. Luke." In later years the pretence of
performing miracles to cure diseases had a great effect in advancing
superstition and retarding scientific investigation.

Tacitus and Suetonius record miracles alleged to have been performed by
Vespasian. He is said to have anointed the eyes of a blind man at
Alexandria with the royal spittle, and to have restored his sight.
Another case was that of a man who had lost the use of his hands, and
Vespasian touched them with his foot and thus restored their function.
It is interesting to follow the career of Proclus, the last rector of
the Neoplatonic School, "whose life," says Gibbon, "with that of his
scholar Isidore, composed by two of their most learned disciples,
exhibits a most deplorable picture of the second childhood of human
reason." By long fasting and prayer Proclus pretended to possess the
supernatural power of expelling all diseases.

The priests of the Church denounced the practice of _Anatomy_, and so
changed the progress made by the Alexandrian School, and by men like
Galen, into the ignorance of a thousand years. The body was the temple
of the Holy Ghost, and should not therefore be desecrated by
dissection. "Strangers' rests" and hospitals were connected with the
monasteries, and were exceedingly useful, notably in the time of the
Crusades, but these Church institutions were in a very insanitary
condition, for the maxim that cleanliness is next to godliness had
little application among the religious orders of the Middle Ages. Dr.
Walsh attempts to show that the Reformers blackened the fair fame of the
Church they had left, and states that it is to "this unfortunate state
of affairs, and not real opposition on the part of the Popes to
science," that we owe the belief in "the supposed opposition between the
Church and Science."[40] That the Popes did something to foster medical
science in