later attitude of Christianity toward disease must
be considered in the light of this fact. We owe to Christianity the
first real hospitals, the first really compassionate and unselfish care
for the sick and impulses which, as they have finally worked out, have
had more to do with giving quality and direction to medicine and
particularly in investing the whole practice of medicine with its true
atmosphere than any other single force.

And yet all this has been a long, long time coming true and for almost
1,500 years the Church and its authorities were a hindrance rather than
a help and that for two or three outstanding reasons. Christianity, to
begin with, sadly underestimated physical values in its overinsistence
upon spiritual values. The body was at best but the tabernacle of the
soul and the soul being the chief concern, whatever happened to the body
was of little importance. The body was not only underestimated, it was
scorned and abused, starved and scourged; it was the seat of unholy
influences and impulses; its natural longings were at the best under
suspicion, at the worst under absolute condemnation. Christianity,
speaking through the Church, took immense care for its spiritual
hygiene, though even here it went wrong because it forgot Plato's noble
word, but it failed utterly in physical hygiene.

Then again sickness and suffering were for the Church but the manifest
punishment of some sin known or concealed. To interfere, therefore, was
in some way to defeat the justice of God. Pestilences were inscrutable
providences; they were the wrath of God made manifest. In the face of so
stupendous a calamity anything man might do was not only futile but
impertinent.

By a strange contradiction early and medieval Christianity, while making
little of the body, nevertheless strongly opposed any study of anatomy
which depended upon post-mortems or dissection. This probably because of
their belief in the resurrection of the body. Any mutilation of the body
after death would be a real handicap in the day of resurrection. But
behind all this, equally real though intangible, was the desire of the
Church to have the whole of life under its own direct control. It
instinctively feared methods of thought or processes of investigation
not directly a part of its own imperial administration of life. Some
subtle distrust of the human reason went along with all this. As a
result the Church, in the main, threw herself against the mor