cs, and diseases, with their far-reaching social and political
consequences,--consequences that are too little noted, or even
understood, by historians,--might have met with adequate resistance, and
some would never have occurred.

The Pagan schools of medicine came to an untimely, although in some
cases a lingering, end. "The introduction of Christianity," says a
medical writer, "had an undoubted influence on the course of medical
science; for the Christian was taught to recognise, in every bodily
infirmity, the dispensation of the Almighty, and in the calm, abstracted
pursuits of those holy men who passed their time in prayer and
meditation, a propitiation: hence medicine fell into the hands of monks
and anchorites, who assumed to themselves, exclusively, the power of
interpreting all natural phenomena as indications of the Divine Will,
and pretended to possess some occult and supernatural means of curing
disease."[38] Reversing the natural order of things, the physician was
replaced by the priest. The supernaturalistic theory was revived, and
held its own for well on a thousand years. For every complaint the
Church provided a specific in the shape of a charm, an incantation, or a
saint. St. Apollonia for toothache, St. Avertin for lunacy, St. Benedict
for stone, St. Clara for sore eyes, St. Herbert for hydrophobia, St.
John for epilepsy, St. Maur for gout, St. Pernel for agues, St.
Genevieve for fevers, St. Sebastian for plague, etc.[39] The height of
absurdity was reached when, in spite of the monopoly of the treatment of
disease by the priesthood, the Council of Rheims (1119) actually forbade
monks to study medicine. This was followed by the Council of Beziers
(1246) prohibiting Christians applying for relief to Jewish physicians,
at a time when practically the only doctors of ability in Christendom
were Jews. In 1243 the Dominicans banished all books on medicine from
their monasteries. Innocent III. forbade physicians practising except
under the supervision of an ecclesiastic. Honorius (1222) forbade
priests the study of medicine; and at the end of the thirteenth Century
Boniface VIII. interdicted surgery as atheistical. The ill-treatment and
opposition experienced by the great Vesalius at the hands of the Church,
on account of his anatomical researches, is one of the saddest chapters
in the history of science.[40]

When the sight of bodily disease strengthened and confirmed belief in
the supernatural, mental dis