I.  THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE.


Nothing in the evolution of human thought appears more inevitable

than the idea of supernatural intervention in producing and

curing disease.  The causes of disease are so intricate that they

are reached only after ages of scientific labour.  In those

periods when man sees everywhere miracle and nowhere law,--when

he attributes all things which he can not understand to a will

like his own,--he naturally ascribes his diseases either to the

wrath of a good being or to the malice of an evil being.



This idea underlies the connection of the priestly class with the

healing art:  a connection of which we have survivals among rude

tribes in all parts of the world, and which is seen in nearly

every ancient civilization--especially in the powers over disease

claimed in Egypt by the priests of Osiris and Isis, in Assyria by

the priests of Gibil, in Greece by the priests of Aesculapius,

and in Judea by the priests and prophets of Jahveh.



In Egypt there is evidence, reaching back to a very early period,

that the sick were often regarded as afflicted or possessed by

demons; the same belief comes constantly before us in the great

religions of India and China; and, as regards Chaldea, the

Assyrian tablets recovered in recent years, while revealing the

source of so many myths and legends transmitted to the modern

world through the book of Genesis, show especially this idea of

the healing of diseases by the casting out of devils.  A similar

theory was elaborated in Persia.  Naturally, then, the Old

Testament, so precious in showing the evolution of religious and

moral truth among men, attributes such diseases as the leprosy of

Miriam and Uzziah, the boils of Job, the dysentery of Jehoram,

the withered hand of Jeroboam, the fatal illness of Asa, and many

other ills, to the wrath of God or the malice of Satan; while,

in the New Testament, such examples as the woman "bound by

Satan," the rebuke of the fever, the casting out of the devil

which was dumb, the healing of the person whom "the devil

ofttimes casteth into the fire"--of which case one of the

greatest modern physicians remarks that never was there a truer

description of epilepsy--and various other episodes, show this

same inevitable mode of thought as a refracting medium through

which the teachings and doings of the Great Physician were

revealed to future generations.



In Greece, though this idea of an occult evil agency in producing

bodily ills appeared at an early period, there also came the

first beginnings, so far as we know, of a really scientific

theory of medicine.  Five hundred years before Christ, in the

bloom period of thought--the period of Aeschylus, Phidias,

Pericles, Socrates, and Plato--appeared Hippocrates, one of the

greatest names in history.  Quietly but thoroughly he broke away

from the old tradition, developed scientific thought, and laid

the foundations of medical science upon experience, observation,

and reason so deeply and broadly that his teaching remains to

this hour among the most precious possessions of our race.



His thought was passed on to the School of Alexandria, and there

medical science was developed yet further, especially by such men

as Herophilus and Erasistratus.  Under their lead studies in

human anatomy began by dissection; the old prejudice which had

weighed so long upon science, preventing that method of

anatomical investigation without which there can be no real

results, was cast aside apparently forever.[289]



[289] For extended statements regarding medicine in Egypt, Judea,

and Eastern nations generally, see Sprengel, Histoire de la

Medecine, and Haeser; and for more succinct accounts, Baas,

Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 15-29; also Isensee; also Fredault,

Histoire de la Medecine, chap. i.  For the effort in Egyptian

medicine to deal with demons and witches, see Heinrich Brugsch,

Die Aegyptologie, Leipsic, 1891, p. 77; and for references to the

Papyrus Ebers, etc., pp. 155, 407, and following.  For fear of

dissection and prejudices against it in Egypt, like those in

mediaeval Europe, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p.

216. For the derivation of priestly medicine in Egypt, see Baas,

pp. 16, 22.  For the fame of Egyptian medicine at Rome, see

Sharpe, History of Egypt, vol. ii, pp. 151, 184.  For Assyria,

see especially George Smith in Delitzsch's German translation, p.

34, and F. Delitzsch's appendix, p. 27.  On the cheapness and

commonness of miracles of healing in antiquity, see Sharpe,

quoting St. Jerome, vol. ii, pp. 276, 277.  As to the influence

of Chaldean ideas of magic and disease, see Lecky, History of

European Morals, vol. i, p. 404 and note.  But, on the other

hand, see reference in Homer to diseases caused by a "demon."

For the evolution of medicine before and after Hippocrates, see

Sprengel.  For a good summing up of the work of Hippocrates, see

Baas, p. 201.  For the necessary passage of medicine in its early

stages under priestly control, see Cabanis, The Revolution of

Medical Science, London, 1806, chap. ii.  On Jewish ideas

regarding demons, and their relation to sickness, see Toy,

Judaism and Christianity, Boston, 1891, pp. 168 et seq.  For

avoidance of dissections of human subjects even by Galen and his

disciples, see Maurice Albert, Les Medecins Grecs a Rome, Paris,

1894, chap. xi.  For Herophilus, Erasistratus, and the School of

Alexandria, see Sprengel, vol. i, pp. 433, 434 et seq.





But with the coming in of Christianity a great new chain of

events was set in motion which modified this development most

profoundly.  The influence of Christianity on the healing art was

twofold:  there was first a blessed impulse--the thought,

aspiration, example, ideals, and spirit of Jesus of Nazareth.

This spirit, then poured into the world, flowed down through the

ages, promoting self-sacrifice for the sick and wretched.

Through all those succeeding centuries, even through the rudest,

hospitals and infirmaries sprang up along this blessed stream.

Of these were the Eastern establishments for the cure of the sick

at the earliest Christian periods, the Infirmary of Monte Cassino

and the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons in the sixth century, the Hotel-Dieu

at Paris in the seventh, and the myriad refuges for the sick and

suffering which sprang up in every part of Europe during the

following centuries.  Vitalized by this stream, all medieval

growths of mercy bloomed luxuriantly.  To say nothing of those at

an earlier period, we have in the time of the Crusades great

charitable organizations like the Order of St. John of

Jerusalem, and thenceforward every means of bringing the spirit

of Jesus to help afflicted humanity.  So, too, through all those

ages we have a succession of men and women devoting themselves to

works of mercy, culminating during modern times in saints like

Vincent de Paul, Francke, Howard, Elizabeth Fry, Florence

Nightingale, and Muhlenberg.



But while this vast influence, poured forth from the heart of the

Founder of Christianity, streamed through century after century,

inspiring every development of mercy, there came from those who

organized the Church which bears his name, and from those who

afterward developed and directed it, another stream of

influence--a theology drawn partly from prehistoric conceptions

of unseen powers, partly from ideas developed in the earliest

historic nations, but especially from the letter of the Hebrew

and Christian sacred books.



The theology deveLoped out of our sacred literature in relation

to the cure of disease was mainly twofold:  first, there was a

new and strong evolution of the old idea that physical disease is

produced by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan, or by a

combination of both, which theology was especially called in to

explain; secondly, there were evolved theories of miraculous

methods of cure, based upon modes of appeasing the Divine anger,

or of thwarting Satanic malice.



Along both these streams of influence, one arising in the life of

Jesus, and the other in the reasonings of theologians, legends of

miracles grew luxuriantly.  It would be utterly unphilosophical

to attribute these as a whole to conscious fraud.  Whatever part

priestcraft may have taken afterward in sundry discreditable

developments of them, the mass of miraculous legends, Century

after century, grew up mainly in good faith, and as naturally as

elms along water-courses or flowers upon the prairie.







II.  GROWTH OF LEGENDS OF HEALING.

--  THE LIFE OF XAVIER AS A TYPICAL EXAMPLE.





Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all great

benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints and

devotees.  Throughout human history the lives of such personages,

almost without exception, have been accompanied or followed by a

literature in which legends of miraculous powers form a very

important part--a part constantly increasing until a different

mode of looking at nature and of weighing testimony causes

miracles to disappear.  While modern thought holds the testimony

to the vast mass of such legends in all ages as worthless, it is

very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings who endow

the earth with higher religious ideas, gaining the deepest hold

upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at times exercise

such influence upon those about them that the sick in mind or

body are helped or healed.



We have within the modern period very many examples which enable

us to study the evolution of legendary miracles.  Out of these I

will select but one, which is chosen because it is the life of

one of the most noble and devoted men in the history of humanity,

one whose biography is before the world with its most minute

details--in his own letters, in the letters of his associates, in

contemporary histories, and in a multitude of biographies:  this

man is St. Francis Xavier.  From these sources I draw the facts

now to be given, but none of them are of Protestant origin;

every source from which I shall draw is Catholic and Roman, and

published under the sanction of the Church.



Born a Spanish noble, Xavier at an early age cast aside all

ordinary aims, devoted himself to study, was rapidly advanced to

a professorship at Paris, and in this position was rapidly

winning a commanding influence, when he came under the sway of

another Spaniard even greater, though less brilliantly endowed,

than himself--Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus.

The result was that the young professor sacrificed the brilliant

career on which he had entered at the French capital, went to the

far East as a simple missionary, and there devoted his remaining

years to redeeming the lowest and most wretched of our race.



Among the various tribes, first in lower India and afterward in

Japan, he wrought untiringly--toiling through village after

village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell,

trying to teach them the simplest Christian formulas; and thus

he brought myriads of them to a nominal Confession of the

Christian faith.  After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new

conquests for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert

island of San Chan.



During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers of

letters, which were preserved and have since been published; and

these, with the letters of his contemporaries, exhibit clearly

all the features of his life.  His own writings are very minute,

and enable us to follow him fully.  No account of a miracle

wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any

contemporary document.[290] At the outside, but two or three

things occurred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by

himself and his contemporaries, for which the most earnest

devotee could claim anything like Divine interposition; and

these are such as may be read in the letters of very many fervent

missionaries, Protestant as well as Catholic.  For example, in

the beginning of his career, during a journey in Europe with an

ambassador, one of the servants in fording a stream got into deep

water and was in danger of drowning.  Xavier tells us that the

ambassador prayed very earnestly, and that the man finally

struggled out of the stream.  But within sixty years after his

death, at his canonization, and by various biographers, this had

been magnified into a miracle, and appears in the various

histories dressed out in glowing colours.  Xavier tells us that

the ambassador prayed for the safety of the young man; but his

biographers tell us that it was Xavier who prayed, and finally,

by the later writers, Xavier is represented as lifting horse and

rider out of the stream by a clearly supernatural act.



[290] This statement was denied with much explosive emphasis by a

writer in the Catholic World for September and October, 1891, but

he brought no FACT to support this denial.  I may perhaps be

allowed to remind the reverend writer that since the days of

Pascal, whose eminence in the Church he will hardly dispute, the

bare assertion even of a Jesuit father against established facts

needs some support other than mere scurrility.





Still another claim to miracle is based upon his arriving at

Lisbon and finding his great colleague, Simon Rodriguez, ill of

fever.  Xavier informs us in a very simple way that Rodriguez was

so overjoyed to see him that the fever did not return.  This is

entirely similar to the cure which Martin Luther wrought upon

Melanchthon.  Melanchthon had broken down and was supposed to be

dying, when his joy at the long-delayed visit of Luther brought

him to his feet again, after which he lived for many years.



Again, it is related that Xavier, finding a poor native woman

very ill, baptized her, saying over her the prayers of the

Church, and she recovered.



Two or three occurrences like these form the whole basis for the

miraculous account, so far as Xavier's own writings are

concerned.



Of miracles in the ordinary sense of the word there is in these

letters of his no mention.  Though he writes of his doings with

especial detail, taking evident pains to note everything which he

thought a sign of Divine encouragement, he says nothing of his

performing miracles, and evidently knows nothing of them.  This

is clearly not due to his unwillingness to make known any token

of Divine favour.  As we have seen, he is very prompt to report

anything which may be considered an answer to prayer or an

evidence of the power of religious means to improve the bodily or

spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.



Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any

miracles wrought by him.  His brother missionaries, who were in

constant and loyal fellowship with him, make no allusions to them

in their communications with each other or with their brethren in

Europe.



Of this fact we have many striking evidences.  Various

collections of letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and

the East generally, during the years of Xavier's activity, were

published, and in not one of these letters written during

Xavier's lifetime appears any account of a miracle wrought by

him.  As typical of these collections we may take perhaps the

most noted of all, that which was published about twenty years

after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.



The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates

not only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort

and the centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East,

but from all other important points in the great field.  The

first of them were written during the saint's lifetime, but,

though filled with every sort of detail regarding missionary life

and work, they say nothing regarding any miracles by Xavier.



The same is true of various other similar collections published

during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  In not one of

them does any mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter

from India or the East contemporary with him.



This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any

"evil heart of unbelief."  On the contrary, these good missionary

fathers were prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they

thought evidence of the Divine favour:  it is indeed touching to

see how eagerly they grasp at the most trivial things which could

be thus construed.



Their ample faith was fully shown.  One of them, in Acosta's

collection, sends a report that an illuminated cross had been

recently seen in the heavens; another, that devils had been cast

out of the natives by the use of holy water; another, that

various cases of disease had been helped and even healed by

baptism; and sundry others sent reports that the blind and dumb

had been restored, and that even lepers had been cleansed by the

proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no miracles

are imputed by his associates during his life or during several

years after his death.



On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal

limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully

confirmed by his brother workers.  It is interesting, for

example, in view of the claim afterward made that the saint was

divinely endowed for his mission with the "gift of tongues," to

note in these letters confirmation of Xavier's own statement

utterly disproving the existence of any such Divine gift, and

detailing the difficulties which he encountered from his want of

knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he underwent

in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.



Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel

Acosta's publication shows, the letters of the missionaries

continued without any indication of miracles performed by the

saint.  Though, as we shall see presently, abundant legends had

already begun to grow elsewhere, not one word regarding these

miracles came as yet from the country which, according to later

accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was at this very

period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication of

them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of

these miraculous manifestations.



But this negative evidence is by no means all.  There is also

positive evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order

itself--that Xavier wrought no miracles.



For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything

of the mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest

contemporary authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest

correspondence with those who knew most about the saint, a member

of the Society of Jesus in the highest standing and one of its

accepted historians, not only expressly tells us that Xavier

wrought no miracles, but gives the reasons why he wrought none.



This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its

visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of

the University of Salamanca.  In 1571, nineteen years after

Xavier's death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly

concerning the conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers

especially and with the greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him

up as an ideal and his work as an example.



But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary

Acosta goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's

conversion is not so rapid as in the early apostolic times, and

says that an especial cause why apostolic preaching could no

longer produce apostolic results "lies in the missionaries

themselves, because there is now no power of working miracles."

He then asks, "Why should our age be so completely destitute of

them?"  This question he answers at great length, and one of his

main contentions is that in early apostolic times illiterate men

had to convert the learned of the world, whereas in modern times

the case is reversed, learned men being sent to convert the

illiterate; and hence that "in the early times miracles were

necessary, but in our time they are not."



This statement and argument refer, as we have seen, directly to

Xavier by name, and to the period covered by his activity and

that of the other great missionaries of his time.  That the

Jesuit order and the Church at large thought this work of Acosta

trustworthy is proved by the fact that it was published at

Salamanca a few years after it was written, and republished

afterward with ecclesiastical sanction in France.[291]  Nothing

shows better than the sequel how completely the evolution of

miraculous accounts depends upon the intellectual atmosphere of

any land and time, and how independent it is of fact.



[291]The work of Joseph Acosta is in the Cornell University

Library, its title being as follows: De Natura Novi Orbis libri

duo et De Promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De

Procuranda Indorum Salute, libri sex, autore Jesepho Acosta,

presbytero Societis Jesu. I. H. S. Salmanticas, apud Guillelmum

Foquel, MDLXXXIX.  For the passages cited directly contradicting

the working of miracles by Xavier and his associates, see lib.

ii, cap. ix, of which the title runs, Cur Miracula in Conversione

gentium non fiant nunc, ut olim, a Christi praedicatoribus,

especially pp. 242-245; also lib. ii, cap. viii, pp. 237 et seq.

For a passage which shows that Xavier was not then at all

credited with "the miraculous gift of tongues," see lib. i, cap.

vii, p. 173.  Since writing the above, my attention has been

called to the alleged miraculous preservation of Xavier's body

claimed in sundry letters contemporary with its disinterment at

San Chan and reinterment at Goa.  There is no reason why this

preservation in itself need be doubted, and no reason why it

should be counted miraculous.  Such exceptional preservation of

bodies has been common enough in all ages, and, alas for the

claims of the Church, quite as common of pagans or Protestants as

of good Catholics.  One of the most famous cases is that of the

fair Roman maiden, Julia, daughter of Claudius, over whose

exhumation at Rome, in 1485, such ado was made by the sceptical

scholars of the Renaissance.  Contemporary observers tell us

enthusiastically that she was very beautiful, perfectly

preserved, "the bloom of youth still upom her cheeks," and

exhaling a "sweet odour"; but this enthusiasm was so little to

the taste of Pope Innocent VIII that he had her reburied secretly

by night.  Only the other day, in June of the year 1895, there

was unearthed at Stade, in Hanover, the "perfectly preserved"

body of a soldier of the eighth century.  So, too, I might

mention the bodies preserved at the church of St. Thomas at

Strasburg, beneath the Cathedral of Bremen, and elsewhere during

hundreds of years past; also the cases of "adiposeration" in

various American cemeteries, which never grow less wonderful by

repetition from mouth to mouth and in the public prints.  But,

while such preservation is not incredible or even strange, there

is much reason why precisely in the case of a saint like St.

Francis Xavier the evidence for it should be received with

especial caution.  What the touching fidelity of disciples may

lead them to believe and proclaim regarding an adored leader in a

time when faith is thought more meritorious than careful

statement, and miracle more probable than the natural course of

things, is seen, for example, in similar pious accounts regarding

the bodies of many other saints, especially that of St. Carlo

Borromeo, so justly venerated by the Church for his beautiful and

charitable life.  And yet any one looking at the relics of

various saints, especially those of St. Carlo, preserved with

such tender care in the crypt of Milan Cathedral, will see that

they have shared the common fate, being either mummified or

reduced to skeletons; and this is true in all cases, as far as my

observation has extended.  What even a great theologian can be

induced to believe and testify in a somewhat similar matter, is

seen in St. Augustine's declaration that the flesh of the

peacock, which in antiquity and in the early Church was

considered a bird somewhat supernaturally endowed, is

incorruptible.  The saint declares that he tested it and found it

so (see the De Civitate dei, xxi, c. 4, under the passage

beginning Quis enim Deus).  With this we may compare the

testimony of the pious author of Sir John Mandeville's Travels,

that iron floats upon the Dead Sea while feathers sink in it, and

that he would not have believed this had he not seen it.  So,

too, testimony to the "sweet odour" diffused by the exhumed

remains of the saint seem to indicate feeling rather than

fact--those highly wrought feelings of disciples standing by--the

same feeling which led those who visited St. Simon Stylites on

his heap of ordure, and other hermits unwashed and living in

filth, to dwell upon the delicious "odour of sanctity' pervading

the air.  In point, perhaps, is Louis Veuillot's idealization of

the "parfum de Rome," in face of the fact, to which the present

writer and thousands of others can testify, that under Papal rule

Rome was materially one of the most filthy cities in Christendom.

For the case of Julia, see the contemporary letter printed by

Janitschek, Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien, p. 120, note

167; also Infessura, Diarium Rom. Urbis, in Muratori, tom. iii,

pt. 2, col. 1192, 1193, and elsewhere; also Symonds, Renaissance

in Italy: Age of Despots, p. 22.  For the case at Stade, see

press dispatch from Berlin in newspapers of June 24, 25, 1895.

The copy of Emanuel Acosta I have mainly used is that in the

Royal Library at Munich, De Japonicus rebus epistolarum libri

iii, item recogniti; et in Latinum ex Hispanico sermone conversi,

Dilingae, MDLXXI.  I have since obtained and used the work now in

the library of Cornell University, being the letters and

commentary published by Emanuel Acosta and attached to Maffei's

book on the History of the Indies, published at Antwerp in 1685.

For the first beginnings of miracles wrought by Xavier, as given

in the letters of the missionaries, see that of Almeida, lib. ii,

p. 183.  Of other collections, or selections from collections, of

letters which fail to give any indication of miracles wrought by

Xavier during his life, see Wytfliet and Magin, Histoire

Universelle des Indes Occidentales et Orientales, et de la

Conversion des Indiens, Douay, 1611.  Though several letters of

Xavier and his fellow-missionaries are given, dated at the very

period of his alleged miracles, not a trace of miracles appears

in these.  Also Epistolae Japonicae de multorum in variis Insulis

Gentilium ad Christi fidem Conversione, Lovanii, 1570.  These

letters were written by Xavier and his companions from the East

Indies and Japan, and cover the years from 1549 to 1564.  Though

these refer  frequently to Xavier, there is no mention of a

miracle wrought by him in any of them written during his

lifetime.





For, shortly after Xavier's heroic and beautiful death in 1552,

stories of miracles wrought by him began to appear.  At first

they were few and feeble; and two years later Melchior Nunez,

Provincial of the Jesuits in the Portuguese dominions, with all

the means at his command, and a correspondence extending

throughout Eastern Asia, had been able to hear of but three.

These were entirely from hearsay.  First, John Deyro said he knew

that Xavier had the gift of prophecy; but, unfortunately, Xavier

himself had reprimanded and cast off Deyro for untruthfulness and

cheatery.  Secondly, it was reported vaguely that at Cape Comorin

many persons affirmed that Xavier had raised a man from the dead.

Thirdly, Father Pablo de Santa Fe had heard that in Japan Xavier

had restored sight to a blind man.  This seems a feeble

beginning, but little by little the stories grew, and in 1555 De

Quadros, Provincial of the Jesuits in Ethiopia, had heard of nine

miracles, and asserted that Xavier had healed the sick and cast

out devils.  The next year, being four years after Xavier's

death, King John III of Portugal, a very devout man, directed his

viceroy Barreto to draw up and transmit to him an authentic

account of Xavier's miracles, urging him especially to do the

work "with zeal and speedily."  We can well imagine what

treasures of grace an obsequious viceroy, only too anxious to

please a devout king, could bring together by means of the

hearsay of ignorant, compliant natives through all the little

towns of Portuguese India.



But the letters of the missionaries who had been co-workers or

immediate successors of Xavier in his Eastern field were still

silent as regards any miracles by him, and they remained silent

for nearly ten years.  In the collection of letters published by

Emanuel Acosta and others no hint at any miracles by him is

given, until at last, in 1562, fully ten years after Xavier's

death, the first faint beginnings of these legends appear in

them.



At that time the Jesuit Almeida, writing at great length to the

brethren, stated that he had found a pious woman who believed

that a book left behind by Xavier had healed sick folk when it

was laid upon them, and that he had met an old man who preserved

a whip left by the saint which, when properly applied to the

sick, had been found good both for their bodies and their souls.

From these and other small beginnings grew, always luxuriant and

sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends which we shall see

hereafter.



This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and

less critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous;

but it appears to have been thought of little value by those best

able to judge.



For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn

oration on the condition and glory of the Church, before the

papal legates and other fathers assembled at the Council of

Trent, while he alluded to a multitude of things showing the

Divine favour, there was not the remotest allusion to the vast

multitude of miracles which, according to the legends, had been

so profusely lavished on the faithful during many years, and

which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of

prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.



The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours

vouchsafed to the Church, or at least of any belief in them,

appears in that great Council of Trent among the fathers

themselves.  Certainly there, if anywhere, one might on the Roman

theory expect Divine illumination in a matter of this kind.  The

presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it was especially

claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual as well as

material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the

Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own

friend and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not

the slightest sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles.  We

have the letters of Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these

fathers assembled at Trent, from 1557 onward for a considerable

time, and we have also a multitude of letters written from the

Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the Pope himself,

discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one of these

is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these

reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles,

were worthy of mention.



Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much

significance.  With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a

Latin translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the

Indies," written by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's

death.  Though the letter came from a field very distant from

that in which Xavier laboured, it was sure, among the general

tokens of Divine favour to the Church and to the order, on which

it dwelt, to have alluded to miracles wrought by Xavier had there

been the slightest ground for believing in them; but no such

allusion appears.[292]



[292] For the work referred to, see Julii Gabrielii Eugubini

orationum et epistolarum, etc., libri duo [et] Epitola de rebus

Indicis a quodam Societatis Jesu presbytero, etc., Venetiis,

1569.  The Epistola begins at fol. 44.





So, too, when in 1588, thirty-six years after Xavier's death, the

Jesuit father Maffei, who had been especially conversant with

Xavier's career in the East, published his History of India,

though he gave a biography of Xavier which shows fervent

admiration for his subject, he dwelt very lightly on the alleged

miracles.  But the evolution of miraculous legends still went on.

Six years later, in 1594, Father Tursellinus published his Life

of Xavier, and in this appears to have made the first large use

of the information collected by the Portuguese viceroy and the

more zealous brethren.  This work shows a vast increase in the

number of miracles over those given by all sources together up to

that time.  Xavier is represented as not only curing the sick,

but casting out devils, stilling the tempest, raising the dead,

and performing miracles of every sort.



In 1622 came the canonization proceedings at Rome.  Among the

speeches made in the presence of Pope Gregory XV, supporting the

claims of Xavier to saintship, the most important was by Cardinal

Monte.  In this the orator selects out ten great miracles from

those performed by Xavier during his lifetime and describes them

minutely.  He insists that on a certain occasion Xavier, by the

sign of the cross, made sea-water fresh, so that his

fellow-passengers and the crew could drink it; that he healed

the sick and raised the dead in various places; brought back a

lost boat to his ship; was on one occasion lifted from the earth

bodily and transfigured before the bystanders; and that, to

punish a blaspheming town, he caused an earthquake and buried the

offenders in cinders from a volcano:  this was afterward still

more highly developed, and the saint was represented in

engravings as calling down fire from heaven and thus destroying

the town.



The most curious miracle of all is the eighth on the cardinal's

list.  Regarding this he states that, Xavier having during one of

his voyages lost overboard a crucifix, it was restored to him

after he had reached the shore by a crab.



The cardinal also dwelt on miracles performed by Xavier's relics

after his death, the most original being that sundry lamps placed

before the image of the saint and filled with holy water burned

as if filled with oil.



This latter account appears to have deeply impressed the Pope,

for in the Bull of Canonization issued by virtue of his power of

teaching the universal Church infallibly in all matters

pertaining to faith and morals, His Holiness dwells especially

upon the miracle of the lamp filled with holy water and burning

before Xavier's image.



Xavier having been made a saint, many other Lives of him

appeared, and, as a rule, each surpassed its predecessor in the

multitude of miracles.  In 1622 appeared that compiled and

published under the sanction of Father Vitelleschi, and in it not

only are new miracles increased, but some old ones are greatly

improved.  One example will suffice to show the process.  In his

edition of 1596, Tursellinus had told how, Xavier one day needing

money, and having asked Vellio, one of his friends, to let him

have some, Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing thirty

thousand gold pieces.  Xavier took three hundred and returned the

key to Vellio; whereupon Vellio, finding only three hundred

pieces gone, reproached Xavier for not taking more, saying that

he had expected to give him half of all that the strong box

contained.  Xavier, touched by this generosity, told Vellio that

the time of his death should be made known to him, that he might

have opportunity to repent of his sins and prepare for eternity.

But twenty-six years later the Life of Xavier published under

the sanction of Vitelleschi, giving the story, says that Vellio

on opening the safe found that ALL HIS MONEY remained as he had

left it, and that NONE AT ALL had disappeared; in fact, that

there had been a miraculous restitution.  On his blaming Xavier

for not taking the money, Xavier declares to Vellio that not only

shall he be apprised of the moment of his death, but that the box

shall always be full of money.  Still later biographers improved

the account further, declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that

the strong box should always contain money sufficient for all his

needs.  In that warm and uncritical atmosphere this and other

legends grew rapidly, obedient to much the same laws which govern

the evolution of fairy tales.[293]



[293] The writer in the Catholic World, already mentioned, rather

rashly asserts that there is no such Life of Xavier as that I

have above quoted.  The reverend Jesuit father has evidently

glanced over the bibliographies of Carayon and De Backer, and,

not finding it there under the name of Vitelleschi, has spared

himself further trouble.  It is sufficient to say that the book

may be seen by him in the library of Cornell University.  Its

full title is as follows: Compendio della Vita del s. p.

Francesco Xaviero dell Campagnia di Giesu, Canonizato con s.

Ignatio Fondatore dell' istessa Religione dalla Santita di N. S.

Gregorio XV. Composto, e dato in luce per ordine del Reverendiss.

P Mutio Vitelleschi Preposito Generale della Comp. di Giesu. In

Venetia, MDCXXII, Appresso Antonio Pinelli. Con Licenza de'

Superiori.  My critic hazards a guess that the book may be a

later edition of Torsellino (Tursellinus), but here again he is

wrong.  It is entirely a different book, giving in its preface a

list of sources comprising eleven authorities besides Torsellino.





In 1682, one hundred and thirty years after Xavier's death,

appeared his biography by Father Bouhours; and this became a

classic.  In it the old miracles of all kinds were enormously

multiplied, and many new ones given.  Miracles few and small in

Tursellinus became many and great in Bouhours.  In Tursellinus,

Xavier during his life saves one person from drowning, in

Bouhours he saves during his life three; in Tursellinus, Xavier

during his life raises four persons from the dead, in Bouhours

fourteen; in Tursellinus there is one miraculous supply of

water, in Bouhours three; in Tursellinus there is no miraculous

draught of fishes, in Bouhours there is one; in Tursellinus,

Xavier is transfigured twice, in Bouhours five times:  and so

through a long series of miracles which, in the earlier lives

appearing either not at all or in very moderate form, are greatly

increased and enlarged by Tursellinus, and finally enormously

amplified and multiplied by Father Bouhours.



And here it must be borne in mind that Bouhours, writing ninety

years after Tursellinus, could not have had access to any new

sources.  Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years, and

of course all the natives upon whom he had wrought his miracles,

and their children and grandchildren, were gone.  It can not then

be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new witnesses,

nor could he have had anything new in the way of contemporary

writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of Xavier's

time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly the

ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any account of

his miracles to writing.  Nevertheless, the miracles of healing

given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than ever.

But there was far more than this.  Although during the lifetime

of Xavier there is neither in his own writings nor in any

contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the

dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death stories

of such resurrections began to appear.  A simple statement of the

growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of

miraculous accounts generally.  At first it was affirmed that

some people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person;

then it was said that there were two persons; then in various

authors--Emanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an

afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De

Quadros, and others--the story wavers between one and two cases;

finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been

developed.  In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were

mentioned; but by the time of Father Bouhours there were

fourteen--all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his

lifetime--and the name, place, and circumstances are given with

much detail in each case.[294]



[294] The writer in the Catholic World, already referred to, has

based an attack here upon a misconception--I will not call it a

deliberate misrepresentation--of his own by stating that these

resurrections occurred after Xavier's death, and were due to his

intercession or the use of his relics.  The statement of the

Jesuit father is utterly without foundation, as a simple

reference to Bouhours will show.  I take the liberty of

commending to his attention The Life of St. Francis Xavier, by

Father Dominic Bouhours, translated by James Dryden, Dublin,

1838.  For examples of raising the dead by the saint DURING HIS

LIFETIME, see pp. 69, 82, 93, 111, 218, 307, 316, 321--fourteen

cases in all.





It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first that

Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful miracles; but

ere long a subsidiary legend was developed, to the effect that

one of the brethren asked him one day if he had raised the dead,

whereat he blushed deeply and cried out against the idea, saying:

"And so I am said to have raised the dead! What a misleading man

I am!  Some men brought a youth to me just as if he were dead,

who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ,

straightway arose."



Noteworthy is the evolution of other miracles.  Tursellinus,

writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa to Malacca,

Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an island, was

afterward found by the persons sent in search of him so deeply

absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all things about him.

But in the next century Father Bouhours develops the story as

follows:  "The servants found the man of God raised from the

ground into the air, his eyes fixed upon heaven, and rays of

light about his countenance."



Instructive, also, is a comparison between the successive

accounts of his noted miracle among the Badages at Travancore, in

1544 Xavier in his letters makes no reference to anything

extraordinary; and Emanuel Acosta, in 1571, declares simply that

"Xavier threw himself into the midst of the Christians, that

reverencing him they might spare the rest."  The inevitable

evolution of the miraculous goes on; and twenty years later

Tursellinus tells us that, at the onslaught of the Badages, "they

could not endure the majesty of his countenance and the splendour

and rays which issued from his eyes, and out of reverence for him

they spared the others."  The process of incubation still goes on

during ninety years more, and then comes Father Bouhours's

account.  Having given Xavier's prayer on the battlefield,

Bouhours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushed

at the head of the people toward the plain where the enemy was

marching, and "said to them in a threatening voice, `I forbid you

in the name of the living God to advance farther, and on His part

command you to return in the way you came.' These few words cast

a terror into the minds of those soldiers who were at the head of

the army; they remained confounded and without motion.  They who

marched afterward, seeing that the foremost did not advance,

asked the reason of it.  The answer was returned from the front

ranks that they had before their eyes an unknown person habited

in black, of more than human stature, of terrible aspect, and

darting fire from his eyes....They were seized with amazement

at the sight, and all of them fled in precipitate confusion."



Curious, too, is the after-growth of the miracle of the crab

restoring the crucifix.  In its first form Xavier lost the

crucifix in the sea, and the earlier biographers dwell on the

sorrow which he showed in consequence; but the later historians

declare that the saint threw the crucifix into the sea in order

to still a tempest, and that, after his safe getting to land, a

crab brought it to him on the shore.  In this form we find it

among illustrations of books of devotion in the next century.



But perhaps the best illustration of this evolution of Xavier's

miracles is to be found in the growth of another legend; and it

is especially instructive because it grew luxuriantly despite the

fact that it was utterly contradicted in all parts of Xavier's

writings as well as in the letters of his associates and in the

work of the Jesuit father, Joseph Acosta.



Throughout his letters, from first to last, Xavier constantly

dwells upon his difficulties with the various languages of the

different tribes among whom he went.  He tells us how he

surmounted these difficulties:  sometimes by learning just enough

of a language to translate into it some of the main Church

formulas; sometimes by getting the help of others to patch

together some pious teachings to be learned by rote; sometimes

by employing interpreters; and sometimes by a mixture of various

dialects, and even by signs.  On one occasion he tells us that a

very serious difficulty arose, and that his voyage to China was

delayed because, among other things, the interpreter he had

engaged had failed to meet him.



In various Lives which appeared between the time of his death

and his canonization this difficulty is much dwelt upon; but

during the canonization proceedings at Rome, in the speeches then

made, and finally in the papal bull, great stress was laid upon

the fact that Xavier possessed THE GIFT OF TONGUES.  It was

declared that he spoke to the various tribes with ease in their

own languages.  This legend of Xavier's miraculous gift of

tongues was especially mentioned in the papal bull, and was

solemnly given forth by the pontiff as an infallible statement to

be believed by the universal Church.  Gregory XV having been

prevented by death from issuing the Bull of Canonization, it was

finally issued by Urban VIII; and there is much food for

reflection in the fact that the same Pope who punished Galileo,

and was determined that the Inquisition should not allow the

world to believe that the earth revolves about the sun, thus

solemnly ordered the world, under pain of damnation, to believe

in Xavier's miracles, including his "gift of tongues," and the

return of the crucifix by the pious crab.  But the legend was

developed still further:  Father Bouhours tells us, "The holy man

spoke very well the language of those barbarians without having

learned it, and had no need of an interpreter when he

instructed."  And, finally, in our own time, the Rev. Father

Coleridge, speaking of the saint among the natives, says, "He

could speak the language excellently, though he had never learned

it."



In the early biography, Tursellinus writes.  "Nothing was a

greater impediment to him than his ignorance of the Japanese

tongues; for, ever and anon, when some uncouth expression

offended their fastidious and delicate ears, the awkward speech

of Francis was a cause of laughter."  But Father Bouhours, a

century later, writing of Xavier at the same period, says, "He

preached in the afternoon to the Japanese in their language, but

so naturally and with so much ease that he could not be taken for

a foreigner."



And finally, in 1872, Father Coleridge, of the Society of Jesus,

speaking of Xavier at this time, says, "He spoke freely,

flowingly, elegantly, as if he had lived in Japan all his life."



Nor was even this sufficient:  to make the legend complete, it

was finally declared that, when Xavier addressed the natives of

various tribes, each heard the sermon in his own language in

which he was born.



All this, as we have seen, directly contradicts not only the

plain statements of Xavier himself, and various incidental

testimonies in the letters of his associates, but the explicit

declaration of Father Joseph Acosta.  The latter historian dwells

especially on the labour which Xavier was obliged to bestow on

the study of the Japanese and other languages, and says, "Even if

he had been endowed with the apostolic gift of tongues, he could

not have spread more widely the glory of Christ."[295]



[295] For the evolution of the miracles of Xavier, see his

Letters, with Life, published by Leon Pages, Paris, 1855; also

Maffei, Historiarum Indicarum libri xvi, Venice, 1589; also the

lives by Tursellinus, various editions, beginning with that of

1594; Vitelleschi, 1622; Bouhours, 1683; Massei, second edition,

1682 (Rome), and others; Bartoli, Baltimore, 1868; Coleridge,

1872.  In addition to these, I have compared, for a more extended

discussion of this subject hereafter, a very great number of

editions of these and other biographies of the saint, with

speeches at the canonization, the bull of Gregory XV, various

books of devotion, and a multitude of special writings, some of

them in manuscript, upon the glories of the saint, including a

large mass of material at the Royal Library in Munich and in the

British Museum.  I have relied entirely upon Catholic authors,

and have not thought it worth while to consult any Protestant

author.  The illustration of the miracle of the crucifix and the

crab in its final form is given in La Devotion de Dix Vendredis a

l'Honneur de St. Francois Xavier, Bruxelles, 1699, Fig. 24: the

pious crab is represented as presenting the crucifix by which a

journey of forty leagues he has brought from the depths of the

ocean to Xavier, who walks upon the shore.  The book is in the

Cornell University Library.  For the letter of King John to

Barreto, see Leon Pages's Lettres de Francois Xavier, Paris,

1855, vol. ii, p. 465.  For the miracle among the Badages,

compare Tursellinus, lib. ii, c. x, p. 16, with Bouhours,

Dryden's translation, pp. 146, 147.  For the miracle of the gift

of tongues, in its higher development, see Bouhours, p. 235, and

Coleridge, vo. i, pp. 151, 154, and vol. ii, p. 551





It is hardly necessary to attribute to the orators and

biographers generally a conscious attempt to deceive.  The simple

fact is, that as a rule they thought, spoke, and wrote in

obedience to the natural laws which govern the luxuriant growth

of myth and legend in the warm atmosphere of love and devotion

which constantly arises about great religious leaders in times

when men have little or no knowledge of natural law, when there

is little care for scientific evidence, and when he who believes

most is thought most meritorious.[296]



[296] Instances can be given of the same evolution of miraculous

legend in our own time.  To say nothing of the sacred fountain at

La Salette, which preserves its healing powers in spite of the

fact that the miracle that gave rise to them has twice been

pronounced fraudulent by the French courts, and to pass without

notice a multitude of others, not only in Catholic but in

Protestant countries, the present writer may allude to one which

in the year 1893 came under his own observation.  On arriving in

St. Petersburg to begin an official residence there, his

attention was arrested by various portraits of a priest of the

Russo-Greek Church; they were displayed in shop windows and held

an honoured place in many private dwellings.  These portraits

ranged from lifelike photographs, which showed a plain, shrewd,

kindly face, to those which were idealized until they bore a

strong resemblance to the conventional representations of Jesus

of Nazareth.  On making inquiries, the writer found that these

portraits represented Father Ivan, of Cronstadt, a priest noted

for his good works, and very widely believed to be endowed with

the power of working miracles.



One day, in one of the most brilliant reception rooms of the

northern capital, the subject of Father Ivan's miracles having

been introduced, a gentleman in very high social position and

entirely trustworthy spoke as follows: "There is something very

surprising about these miracles.  I am slow to believe in them,

but I know the following to be a fact: The late Metropolitan

Archbishop of St. Petersburg loved quiet, and was very adverse to

anything which could possibly cause scandal.  Hearing of Father

Ivan's miracles, he summoned him to his presence and solemnly

commanded him to abstain from all of the things which had given

rise to his reported miracles, and with this injunction,

dismissed him.  Hardly had the priest left the room when the

archbishop was struck with blindness and remained in this

condition until the priest returned and removed his blindness by

intercessory prayers."  When the present writer asked the person

giving this account if he directly knew these facts, he replied

that he was, of course, not present when the miracle was wrought,

but that he had the facts immediately from persons who knew all

the parties concerned and were cognizant directly of the

circumstances of the case.



Some time afterward, the present writer being at an afternoon

reception at one of the greater embassies, the same subject was

touched upon, when an eminent general spoke as follows: "I am not

inclined to believe in miracles, in fact am rather sceptical, but

the proofs of those wrought by Father Ivan are overwhelming."  He

then went on to say that the late Metropolitan Archbishop was a

man who loved quiet and disliked scandal; and that on this

account he had summoned Father Ivan to his palace and ordered him

to put an end to the conduct which had caused the reports

concerning his miraculous powers, and then, with a wave of the

arm, had dismissed him.  The priest left the room, and from that

moment the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, and it remained so

until the penitent prelate summoned the priest again, by whose

prayers the arm was restored to its former usefulness.  There was

present at the time another person besides the writer who had

heard the previous statement as to the blindness of the

archbishop, and on their both questioning the general if he were

sure that the archbishop's arm was paralyzed, as stated, he

declared that he could not doubt it, as he had it directly from

persons entirely trustworthy, who were cognizant of all the

facts.



Some time later, the present writer, having an interview with the

most eminent lay authority in the Greek Church, a functionary

whose duties  had brought him into almost daily contact with the

late archbishop, asked him which of these stories was correct.

This gentleman answered immediately: "Neither; I saw the

archbishop constantly, and no such event occurred; he was never

paralyzed and never blind."



The same gentleman went on to say that, in his belief, Father

Ivan had shown remarkable powers in healing the sick, and the

greatest charity in relieving the distressed.  It was made

clearly evident that Father Ivan is a saintlike man, devoted to

the needy and distressed and exercising an enormous influence

over them--an influence so great that crowds await him whenever

he visits the capital.  In the atmosphere of Russian devotion

myths and legends grow luxuriantly about him, nor is belief in

him confined to the peasant class.  In the autumn of 1894 he was

summoned to the bedside of the Emperor Alexander III.

Unfortunately for the peace of Europe, his intercession at that

time proved unavailing.





These examples will serve to illustrate the process which in

thousands of cases has gone on from the earliest days of the

Church until a very recent period.  Everywhere miraculous cures

became the rule rather than the exception throughout Christendom.







III.  THE MEDIAEVAL MIRACLES OF HEALING CHECK MEDICAL SCIENCE.





So it was that, throughout antiquity, during the early history of

the Church, throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed down to a

comparatively recent period, testimony to miraculous

interpositions which would now be laughed at by a schoolboy was

accepted by the leaders of thought.  St. Augustine was certainly

one of the strongest minds in the early Church, and yet we find

him mentioning, with much seriousness, a story that sundry

innkeepers of his time put a drug into cheese which metamorphosed

travellers into domestic animals, and asserting that the peacock

is so favoured by the Almighty that its flesh will not decay, and

that he has tested it and knows this to be a fact.  With such a

disposition regarding the wildest stories, it is not surprising

that the assertion of St. Gregory of Nazianzen, during the

second century, as to the cures wrought by the martyrs Cosmo and

Damian, was echoed from all parts of Europe until every hamlet

had its miracle-working saint or relic.



The literature of these miracles is simply endless.  To take our

own ancestors alone, no one can read the Ecclesiastical History

of Bede, or Abbot Samson's Miracles of St. Edmund, or the

accounts given by Eadmer and Osbern of the miracles of St.

Dunstan, or the long lists of those wrought by Thomas a Becket,

or by any other in the army of English saints, without seeing the

perfect naturalness of this growth.  This evolution of miracle in

all parts of Europe came out of a vast preceding series of

beliefs, extending not merely through the early Church but far

back into paganism.  Just as formerly patients were cured in the

temples of Aesculapius, so they were cured in the Middle Ages,

and so they are cured now at the shrines of saints.  Just as the

ancient miracles were solemnly attested by votive tablets, giving

names, dates, and details, and these tablets hung before the

images of the gods, so the medieval miracles were attested by

similar tablets hung before the images of the saints; and so

they are attested to-day by similar tablets hung before the

images of Our Lady of La Salette or of Lourdes.  Just as faith in

such miracles persisted, in spite of the small percentage of

cures at those ancient places of healing, so faith persists

to-day, despite the fact that in at least ninety per cent of the

cases at Lourdes prayers prove unavailing.  As a rule, the

miracles of the sacred books were taken as models, and each of

those given by the sacred chroniclers was repeated during the

early ages of the Church and through the medieval period with

endless variations of circumstance, but still with curious

fidelity to the original type.



It should be especially kept in mind that, while the vast

majority of these were doubtless due to the myth-making faculty

and to that development of legends which always goes on in ages

ignorant of the relation between physical causes and effects,

some of the miracles of healing had undoubtedly some basis in

fact.  We in modern times have seen too many cures performed

through influences exercised upon the imagination, such as those

of the Jansenists at the Cemetery of St. Medard, of the

Ultramontanes at La Salette and Lourdes, of the Russian Father

Ivan at St. Petersburg, and of various Protestant sects at Old

Orchard and elsewhere, as well as at sundry camp meetings, to

doubt that some cures, more or less permanent, were wrought by

sainted personages in the early Church and throughout the Middle

Ages.[297]



[297] For the story of travellers converted into domestic

animals, see St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, liber xviii, chaps.

xvii, xviii, in Migne, tom. xli, p.574.  For Gregory of Nazianen

and the similarity of these Christian cures in general character

to those wrought in the temples of Aesculapius, see Sprengel,

vol. ii, pp. 145, 146.  For the miracles wrought at the shrine of

St. Edmund, see Samsonis Abbatis Opus de Miraculis Sancti

Aedmundi, in the Master of the Rolls' series, passim, but

especially chaps. xiv and xix for miracles of healing wrought on

those who drank out of the saint's cup.  For the mighty works of

St. Dunstan, see the Mirac. Sancti Dunstani, auctore Eadmero and

auctore Osberno, in the Master of the Rolls' series.  As to

Becket, see the Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, in

the same series, and especially the lists of miracles--the mere

index of them in the first volume requires thirteen octavo pages.

For St. Martin of Tours, see the Guizot collection of French

Chronicles.  For miracle and shrine cures chronicled by Bede, see

his Ecclesiastical History, passim, but especially from page 110

to page 267.  For similarity between the ancient custom of

allowing invalids to sleep in the temples of Serapis and the

mediaeval custom of having them sleep in the church of St.

Anthony of Padua and other churches, see Meyer, Aberglaube des

Mittelalters, Basel, 1884, chap. iv.  For the effect of "the

vivid belief in supernatural action which attaches itself to the

tombs of the saints," etc., as "a psychic agent of great value,"

see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, p. 131. For the Jansenist

miracles at Paris, see La Verite des Miracles operes par

l'Intercession de M. de Paris, par Montgeron, Utrecht, 1737, and

especially the cases of Mary Anne Couronneau, Philippe Sargent,

and Gautier de Pezenas.  For some very thoughtful remarks as to

the worthlessness of the testimony to miracles presented during

the canonization proceedings at Rome, see Maury, Legendes

Pieuses, pp. 4-7.





There are undoubtedly serious lesions which yield to profound

emotion and vigorous exertion born of persuasion, confidence, or

excitement.  The wonderful power of the mind over the body is

known to every observant student.  Mr. Herbert Spencer dwells

upon the fact that intense feeling or passion may bring out great

muscular force.  Dr. Berdoe reminds us that "a gouty man who has

long hobbled about on his crutch, finds his legs and power to run

with them if pursued by a wild bull"; and that "the feeblest

invalid, under the influence of delirium or other strong

excitement, will astonish her nurse by the sudden accession of

strength."[298]



[298] For the citation in the text, as well as for a brief but

remarkably valuable discussion of the power of the mind over the

body in disease, see Dr. Berdoe's Medical View of the Miracles at

Lourdes, in The Nineteenth Century for October, 1895.





But miraculous cures were not ascribed to persons merely.

Another growth, developed by the early Church mainly from germs

in our sacred books, took shape in miracles wrought by streams,

by pools of water, and especially by relics.  Here, too, the old

types persisted, and just as we find holy and healing wells,

pools, and streams in all other ancient religions, so we find in

the evolution of our own such examples as Naaman the Syrian cured

of leprosy by bathing in the river Jordan, the blind man restored

to sight by washing in the pool of Siloam, and the healing of

those who touched the bones of Elisha, the shadow of St. Peter,

or the handkerchief of St. Paul.



St. Cyril, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and other great fathers

of the early Church, sanctioned the belief that similar efficacy

was to be found in the relics of the saints of their time; hence,

St. Ambrose declared that "the precepts of medicine are contrary

to celestial science, watching, and prayer," and we find this

statement reiterated from time to time throughout the Middle

Ages.  From this idea was evolved that fetichism which we shall

see for ages standing in the way of medical science.



Theology, developed in accordance with this idea, threw about all

cures, even those which resulted from scientific effort, an

atmosphere of supernaturalism.  The vividness with which the

accounts of miracles in the sacred books were realized in the

early Church continued the idea of miraculous intervention

throughout the Middle Ages.  The testimony of the great fathers

of the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but

everything shows that they so fully expected miracles on the

slightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days

would be regarded as adequate evidence.



In this atmosphere of theologic thought medical science was at

once checked.  The School of Alexandria, under the influence

first of Jews and later of Christians, both permeated with

Oriental ideas, and taking into their theory of medicine demons

and miracles, soon enveloped everything in mysticism.  In the

Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause produced the same

effect; the evolution of ascertained truth in medicine, begun by

Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost forever.

Medical science, trying to advance, was like a ship becalmed in

the Sargasso Sea:  both the atmosphere about it and the medium

through which it must move resisted all progress.  Instead of

reliance upon observation, experience, experiment, and thought,

attention was turned toward supernatural agencies.[299]



[299] For the mysticism which gradually enveloped the School of

Alexandria, see Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, De l'Ecole

d'Alexandrie, Paris, 1845, vol. vi, p. 161.  For the effect of

the new doctrines on the Empire of the East, see Sprengel, vol.

ii, p. 240.  As to the more common miracles of healing and the

acknowledgment of non-Christian miracles of healing by Christian

fathers, see Fort, p. 84.









IV.  THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.

--"PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT.





Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical science

among the first Christians was their attribution of disease to

diabolic influence.  As we have seen, this idea had come from

far, and, having prevailed in Chaldea, Egypt, and Persia, had

naturally entered into the sacred books of the Hebrews.

Moreover, St. Paul had distinctly declared that the gods of the

heathen were devils; and everywhere the early Christians saw in

disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers of evil.

The Gnostic and Manichaean struggles had ripened the theologic

idea that, although at times diseases are punishments by the

Almighty, the main agency in them is Satanic.  The great fathers

and renowned leaders of the early Church accepted and

strengthened this idea. Origen said:  "It is demons which produce

famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions of the air, pestilences; they

hover concealed in clouds in the lower atmosphere, and are

attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen offer to

them as gods."  St. Augustine said:  "All diseases of Christians

are to be ascribed to these demons; chiefly do they torment

fresh-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless, newborn

infants."  Tertullian insisted that a malevolent angel is in

constant attendance upon every person.  Gregory of Nazianzus

declared that bodily pains are provoked by demons, and that

medicines are useless, but that they are often cured by the

laying on of consecrated hands.  St.  Nilus and St. Gregory of

Tours, echoing St. Ambrose, gave examples to show the sinfulness

of resorting to medicine instead of trusting to the intercession

of saints.  St. Bernard, in a letter to certain monks, warned

them that to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony

neither with their religion nor with the honour and purity of

their order. This view even found its way into the canon law,

which declared the precepts of medicine contrary to Divine

knowledge.  As a rule, the leaders of the Church discouraged the

theory that diseases are due to natural causes, and most of them

deprecated a resort to surgeons and physicians rather than to

supernatural means.[300]



[300] For Chaldean, Egyptian, and Persian ideas as to the

diabolic origin of disease, see authorities already cited,

especially Maspero and Sayce.  For Origen, see the Contra Celsum,

lib. viii, chap. xxxi. For Augustine, see De Divinatione

Daemonum, chap. iii (p.585 of Migne, vol. xl).  For Turtullian

and Gregory of Nazianzus, see citations in Sprengel and in Fort,

p. 6.  For St. Nilus, see his life, in the Bollandise Acta

Sanctorum.  For Gregory of Tours, see his Historia Francorum,

lib. v, cap. 6, and his De Mirac. S. Martini, lib. ii, cap. 60.

I owe these citations to Mr. Lea (History of the Inquisition of

the Middle Ages, vol. iii, p. 410, note).  For the letter of St.

Bernard to the monks of St. Anastasius, see his Epistola in

Migne, tom. 182, pp. 550, 551.  For the canon law, see under De

Consecratione, dist. v, c. xxi, "Contraria sunt divinae

cognitioni praecepta medicinae: a jejunio revocant, lucubrare non

sinunt, ab omni intentione meditiationis abducunt."  For the

turning of the Greek mythology into a demonology as largely due

to St. Paul, see I Corinthians x, 20: "The things which the

Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God."





Out of these and similar considerations was developed the vast

system of "pastoral medicine," so powerful not only through the

Middle Ages, but even in modern times, both among Catholics and

Protestants.  As to its results, we must bear in mind that, while

there is no need to attribute the mass of stories regarding

miraculous cures to conscious fraud, there was without doubt, at

a later period, no small admixture of belief biased by

self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of

facts.  Enormous revenues flowed into various monasteries and

churches in all parts of Europe from relics noted for their

healing powers.  Every cathedral, every great abbey, and nearly

every parish church claimed possession of healing relics.  While,

undoubtedly, a childlike faith was at the bottom of this belief,

there came out of it unquestionably a great development of the

mercantile spirit.  The commercial value of sundry relics was

often very high.  In the year 1056 a French ruler pledged

securities to the amount of ten thousand solidi for the

production of the relics of St. Just and St. Pastor, pending a

legal decision regarding the ownership between him and the

Archbishop of Narbonne.  The Emperor of Germany on one occasion

demanded, as a sufficient pledge for the establishment of a city

market, the arm of St. George.  The body of St. Sebastian

brought enormous wealth to the Abbey of Soissons; Rome,

Canterbury, Treves, Marburg, every great city, drew large

revenues from similar sources, and the Venetian Republic ventured

very considerable sums in the purchase of relics.



Naturally, then, corporations, whether lay or ecclesiastical,

which drew large revenue from relics looked with little favour on

a science which tended to discredit their investments.



Nowhere, perhaps, in Europe can the philosophy of this

development of fetichism be better studied to-day than at

Cologne.  At the cathedral, preserved in a magnificent shrine

since about the twelfth century, are the skulls of the Three

Kings, or Wise Men of the East, who, guided by the star of

Bethlehem, brought gifts to the Saviour.  These relics were an

enormous source of wealth to the cathedral chapter during many

centuries.  But other ecclesiastical bodies in that city were

both pious and shrewd, and so we find that not far off, at the

church of St. Gereon, a cemetery has been dug up, and the bones

distributed over the walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his

Theban band of martyrs! Again, at the neighbouring church of St.

Ursula, we have the later spoils of another cemetery, covering

the interior walls of the church as the bones of St. Ursula and

her eleven thousand virgin martyrs:  the fact that many of them,

as anatomists now declare, are the bones of MEN does not appear

in the Middle Ages to have diminished their power of competing

with the relics at the other shrines in healing efficiency.



No error in the choice of these healing means seems to have

diminished their efficacy.  When Prof. Buckland, the eminent

osteologist and geologist, discovered that the relics of St.

Rosalia at Palermo, which had for ages cured diseases and warded

off epidemics, were the bones of a goat, this fact caused not the

slightest diminution in their miraculous power.



Other developments of fetich cure were no less discouraging to

the evolution of medical science.  Very important among these was

the Agnus Dei, or piece of wax from the Paschal candles, stamped

with the figure of a lamb and consecrated by the Pope.  In 1471

Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of this

fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest,

lightning, and hail, as well as in assisting women in childbirth;

and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of

it.  Even as late as 1517 Pope Leo X issued, for a consideration,

tickets bearing a cross and the following inscription:  "This

cross measured forty times makes the height of Christ in his

humanity.  He who kisses it is preserved for seven days from

falling-sickness, apoplexy, and sudden death."



Naturally, the belief thus sanctioned by successive heads of the

Church, infallible in all teaching regarding faith and morals,

created a demand for amulets and charms of all kinds; and under

this influence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches.

Nothing, on the whole, stood more constantly in the way of any

proper development of medical science than these fetich cures,

whose efficacy was based on theological reasoning and sanctioned

by ecclesiastical policy.  It would be expecting too much from

human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues

from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or priests who derived both

wealth and honours from cures wrought at shrines under their

care, or lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics,

should favour the development of any science which undermined

their interests.[301]



[301] See Fort's Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, pp. 211-

213; also the Handbooks of Murray and Baedeker for North Germany,

and various histories of medicine passim; also Collin de Plancy

and scores of others.  For the discovery that the relics of St.

Rosaria at Palermo are simply the bones of a goat, see Gordon,

Life of Buckland, pp. 94-96.  For an account of the Agnes Dei,

see Rydberg, pp. 62, 63; and for "Conception Billets," pp. 64 and

65.  For Leo X's tickets, see Hausser (professor at Heidelberg),

Period of Reformation, English translation, p. 17.









V.  THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES.





Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings of

modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the

unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead.  This

theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as

peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan

civilizations.  So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was

regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life,

and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly

strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic

ideas--the recognition of the human body as the temple of the

Holy Spirit.  Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus

as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in

similar terms.



But this nobler conception was alloyed with a medieval

superstition even more effective, when the formula known as the

Apostles' Creed had, in its teachings regarding the resurrection

of the body, supplanted the doctrine laid down by St. Paul.

Thence came a dread of mutilating the body in such a way that

some injury might result to its final resurrection at the Last

Day, and additional reasons for hindering dissections in the

study of anatomy.



To these arguments against dissection was now added another--one

which may well fill us with amazement.  It is the remark of the

foremost of recent English philosophical historians, that of all

organizations in human history the Church of Rome has caused the

greatest spilling of innocent blood.  No one conversant with

history, even though he admit all possible extenuating

circumstances, and honour the older Church for the great services

which can undoubtedly be claimed for her, can deny this

statement.  Strange is it, then, to note that one of the main

objections developed in the Middle Ages against anatomical

studies was the maxim that "the Church abhors the shedding of

blood."



On this ground, in 1248, the Council of Le Mans forbade surgery

to monks.  Many other councils did the same, and at the end of

the thirteenth century came the most serious blow of all; for

then it was that Pope Boniface VIII, without any of that

foresight of consequences which might well have been expected in

an infallible teacher, issued a decretal forbidding a practice

which had come into use during the Crusades, namely, the

separation of the flesh from the bones of the dead whose remains

it was desired to carry back to their own country.



The idea lying at the bottom of this interdiction was in all

probability that which had inspired Tertullian to make his bitter

utterance against Herophilus; but, be that as it may, it soon

came to be considered as extending to all dissection, and thereby

surgery and medicine were crippled for more than two centuries;

it was the worst blow they ever received, for it impressed upon

the mind of the Church the belief that all dissection is

sacrilege, and led to ecclesiastical mandates withdrawing from

the healing art the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the

Middle Ages and giving up surgery to the lowest class of nomadic

charlatans.



So deeply was this idea rooted in the mind of the universal

Church that for over a thousand years surgery was considered

dishonourable:  the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure

an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a

better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany

ordered that dishonour should no longer attach to the surgical

profession.[302]



[302] As to religious scruples against dissection, and abhorrence

of the Paraschites, or embalmer, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn

of Civilization, p. 216.  For denunciation of surgery by the

Church authorities, see Sprengel, vol. ii, pp. 432-435; also

Fort, pp. 452 et seq.; and for the reasoning which led the Church

to forbid surgery to priests, see especially Fredault, Histoire

de la Medecine, p. 200.  As to the decretal of Boniface VIII, the

usual statement is that he forbade all dissections.  While it was

undoubtedly construed universally to prohibit dissections for

anatomical purposes, its declared intent was as stated in the

text; that it was constantly construed against anatomical

investigations can not for a moment be denied.  This construction

is taken for granted in the great Histoire Litteraire de la

France, founded by the Benedictines, certainly a very high

authority as to the main current of opinion in the Church.  For

the decretal of Boniface VIII, see the Corpus Juris Canonici.  I

have also used the edition of Paris, 1618, where it may be found

on pp. 866, 867.  See also, in spite of the special pleading of

Giraldi, the Benedictine Hist. Lit. de la France, tome xvi, p.

98.









VI.  NEW BEGINNINGS OF MEDICAL SCIENCE.





In spite of all these opposing forces, the evolution of medical

science continued, though but slowly.  In the second century of

the Christian era Galen had made himself a great authority at

Rome, and from Rome had swayed the medical science of the world:

his genius triumphed over the defects of his method; but, though

he gave a powerful impulse to medicine, his dogmatism stood in

its way long afterward.



The places where medicine, such as it thus became, could be

applied, were at first mainly the infirmaries of various

monasteries, especially the larger ones of the Benedictine order:

these were frequently developed into hospitals.  Many monks

devoted themselves to such medical studies as were permitted, and

sundry churchmen and laymen did much to secure and preserve

copies of ancient medical treatises.  So, too, in the cathedral

schools established by Charlemagne and others, provision was

generally made for medical teaching; but all this instruction,

whether in convents or schools, was wretchedly poor.  It

consisted not in developing by individual thought and experiment

the gifts of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but almost

entirely in the parrot-like repetition of their writings.



But, while the inherited ideas of Church leaders were thus

unfavourable to any proper development of medical science, there

were two bodies of men outside the Church who, though largely

fettered by superstition, were far less so than the monks and

students of ecclesiastical schools:  these were the Jews and

Mohammedans.  The first of these especially had inherited many

useful sanitary and hygienic ideas, which had probably been first

evolved by the Egyptians, and from them transmitted to the modern

world mainly through the sacred books attributed to Moses.



The Jewish scholars became especially devoted to medical science.

To them is largely due the building up of the School of Salerno,

which we find flourishing in the tenth century.  Judged by our

present standards its work was poor indeed, but compared with

other medical instruction of the time it was vastly superior:  it

developed hygienic principles especially, and brought medicine

upon a higher plane.



Still more important is the rise of the School of Montpellier;

this was due almost entirely to Jewish physicians, and it

developed medical studies to a yet higher point, doing much to

create a medical profession worthy of the name throughout

southern Europe.



As to the Arabians, we find them from the tenth to the fourteenth

century, especially in Spain, giving much thought to medicine,

and to chemistry as subsidiary to it.  About the beginning of the

ninth century, when the greater Christian writers were supporting

fetich by theology, Almamon, the Moslem, declared, "They are the

elect of God, his best and most useful servants, whose lives are

devoted to the improvement of their rational faculties."  The

influence of Avicenna, the translator of the works of Aristotle,

extended throughout all Europe during the eleventh century.  The

Arabians were indeed much fettered by tradition in medical

science, but their translations of Hippocrates and Galen

preserved to the world the best thus far developed in medicine,

and still better were their contributions to pharmacy:  these

remain of value to the present hour.[303]



[303] For the great services rendered to the development of

medicine by the Jews, see Monteil, Medecine en France, p. 58;

also the historians of medicine generally.  For the quotation

from Almamon, see Gibbon, vol. x, p. 42.  For the services of

both Jews and Arabians, see Bedarride, Histoire des Juifs, p.

115; also Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, tome i, p. 191.  For

the Arabians, especially, see Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire, Histoire

d'Espagne, Paris, 1844, vol. iii, pp. 191 et seq.  For the

tendency of the Mosaic books to insist on hygienic rather than

therapeutical treatment, and its consequences among Jewish

physicians, see Sprengel, but especially Fredault, p.14.





Various Christian laymen also rose above the prevailing theologic

atmosphere far enough to see the importance of promoting

scientific development.  First among these we may name the

Emperor Charlemagne; he and his great minister, Alcuin, not only

promoted medical studies in the schools they founded, but also

made provision for the establishment of botanic gardens in which

those herbs were especially cultivated which were supposed to

have healing virtues.  So, too, in the thirteenth century, the

Emperor Frederick II, though under the ban of the Pope, brought

together in his various journeys, and especially in his crusading

expeditions, many Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and took special

pains to have those which concerned medicine preserved and

studied; he also promoted better ideas of medicine and embodied

them in laws.



Men of science also rose, in the stricter sense of the word, even

in the centuries under the most complete sway of theological

thought and ecclesiastical power; a science, indeed, alloyed

with theology, but still infolding precious germs.  Of these were

men like Arnold of Villanova, Bertrand de Gordon, Albert of

Bollstadt, Basil Valentine, Raymond Lully, and, above all, Roger

Bacon; all of whom cultivated sciences subsidiary to medicine,

and in spite of charges of sorcery, with possibilities of

imprisonment and death, kept the torch of knowledge burning, and

passed it on to future generations.[304]



[304] For the progress of sciences subsidiary to medicine even in

the darkest ages, see Fort, pp. 374, 375; also Isensee,

Geschichte der Medicin, pp. 225 et seq.; also Monteil, p. 89;

Heller, Geschichte der Physik, vol. i, bk. 3; also Kopp,

Geschichte der Chemie.  For Frederick II and his

Medicinal-Gesetz, see Baas, p. 221, but especially Von Raumer,

Geschichte der Hohenstaufen, Leipsic, 1872, vol. iii, p. 259.





From the Church itself, even when the theological atmosphere was

most dense, rose here and there men who persisted in something

like scientific effort.  As early as the ninth century,

Bertharius, a monk of Monte Cassino, prepared two manuscript

volumes of prescriptions selected from ancient writers; other

monks studied them somewhat, and, during succeeding ages,

scholars like Hugo, Abbot of St. Denis,--Notker, monk of St.

Gall,--Hildegard, Abbess of Rupertsberg,--Milo, Archbishop of

Beneventum,--and John of St. Amand, Canon of Tournay, did

something for medicine as they understood it.  Unfortunately,

they generally understood its theory as a mixture of deductions

from Scripture with dogmas from Galen, and its practice as a

mixture of incantations with fetiches.  Even Pope Honorius III

did something for the establishment of medical schools; but he

did so much more to place ecclesiastical and theological fetters

upon teachers and taught, that the value of his gifts may well be

doubted.  All germs of a higher evolution of medicine were for

ages well kept under by the theological spirit.  As far back as

the sixth century so great a man as Pope Gregory I showed himself

hostile to the development of this science.  In the beginning of

the twelfth century the Council of Rheims interdicted the study

of law and physic to monks, and a multitude of other councils

enforced this decree.  About the middle of the same century St.

Bernard still complained that monks had too much to do with

medicine; and a few years later we have decretals like those of

Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise it.  For

many generations there appear evidences of a desire among the

more broad-minded churchmen to allow the cultivation of medical

science among ecclesiastics:  Popes like Clement III and

Sylvester II seem to have favoured this, and we even hear of an

Archbishop of Canterbury skilled in medicine; but in the

beginning of the thirteenth century the Fourth Council of the

Lateran forbade surgical operations to be practised by priests,

deacons, and subdeacons; and some years later Honorius III

reiterated this decree and extended it.  In 1243 the Dominican

order forbade medical treatises to be brought into their

monasteries, and finally all participation of ecclesiastics in

the science and art of medicine was effectually prevented.[305]



[305] For statements as to these decrees of the highest Church

and monastic authorities against medicine and surgery, see

Sprengel, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, p. 204, and elsewhere;

also Buckle, Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 567.  For a long list

of Church dignitaries who practised a semi-theological medicine

in the Middle Ages, see Baas, pp. 204, 205.  For Bertharius,

Hildegard, and others mentioned, see also Sprengel and other

historians of medicine.  For clandestine study and practice of

medicine by sundry ecclesiastics in spite of the prohibition by

the Church, see Von Raumer, Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 438.  For

some remarks on this subject by an eminent and learned

ecclesiastic, see Ricker, O. S. B., professor in the University

of Vienna, Pastoral-Psychiatrie, 1894, pp. 12,13.









VII.  THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.





While various churchmen, building better than they knew, thus did

something to lay foundations for medical study, the Church

authorities, as a rule, did even more to thwart it among the very

men who, had they been allowed liberty, would have cultivated it

to the highest advantage.



Then, too, we find cropping out every where the feeling that,

since supernatural means are so abundant, there is something

irreligious in seeking cure by natural means:  ever and anon we

have appeals to Scripture, and especially to the case of King

Asa, who trusted to physicians rather than to the priests of

Jahveh, and so died.  Hence it was that St. Bernard declared

that monks who took medicine were guilty of conduct unbecoming to

religion.  Even the School of Salerno was held in aversion by

multitudes of strict churchmen, since it prescribed rules for

diet, thereby indicating a belief that diseases arise from

natural causes and not from the malice of the devil:  moreover,

in the medical schools Hippocrates was studied, and he had

especially declared that demoniacal possession is "nowise more

divine, nowise more infernal, than any other disease."  Hence it

was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council, about the beginning of

the thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of

exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment without

calling in ecclesiastical advice.



This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two

hundred and fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing

the command of Pope Innocent and enforcing it with penalties.

Not only did Pope Pius order that all physicians before

administering treatment should call in "a physician of the soul,"

on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily infirmity frequently

arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the end of three

days the patient had not made confession to a priest, the medical

man should cease his treatment, under pain of being deprived of

his right to practise, and of expulsion from the faculty if he

were a professor, and that every physician and professor of

medicine should make oath that he was strictly fulfilling these

conditions.



Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which made the

development of medicine still more difficult--the classing of

scientific men generally with sorcerers and magic-mongers:  from

this largely rose the charge of atheism against physicians, which

ripened into a proverb, "Where there are three physicians there

are two atheists."[306]



[306] "Ubi sunt tres medici ibi sunt duo athei."  For the bull of

Pius V, see the Bullarium Romanum, ed. Gaude, Naples, 1882, tom.

vii, pp. 430, 431.





Magic was so common a charge that many physicians seemed to

believe it themselves.  In the tenth century Gerbert, afterward

known as Pope Sylvester II, was at once suspected of sorcery when

he showed a disposition to adopt scientific methods; in the

eleventh century this charge nearly cost the life of Constantine

Africanus when he broke from the beaten path of medicine; in the

thirteenth, it gave Roger Bacon, one of the greatest benefactors

of mankind, many years of imprisonment, and nearly brought him to

the stake:  these cases are typical of very many.



Still another charge against physicians who showed a talent for

investigation was that of Mohammedanism and Averroism; and

Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis and bark

at Christ."[307]



[307] For Averroes, see Renan, Averroes et l'Averroisme, Paris,

1861, pp. 327-335.  For a perfectly just statement of the only

circumstances which can justify a charge of atheism, see Rev. Dr.

Deems, in Popular Science Monthly, February, 1876.





The effect of this widespread ecclesiastical opposition was, that

for many centuries the study of medicine was relegated mainly to

the lowest order of practitioners.  There was, indeed, one

orthodox line of medical evolution during the later Middle Ages:

St. Thomas Aquinas insisted that the forces of the body are

independent of its physical organization, and that therefore

these forces are to be studied by the scholastic philosophy and

the theological method, instead of by researches into the

structure of the body; as a result of this, mingled with

survivals of various pagan superstitions, we have in anatomy and

physiology such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the

brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human

vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan

the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and

that of the spleen as the centre of wit.



Closely connected with these methods of thought was the doctrine

of signatures.  It was reasoned that the Almighty must have set

his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he has

provided:  hence it was held that bloodroot, on account of its

red juice, is good for the blood; liverwort, having a leaf like

the liver, cures diseases of the liver; eyebright, being marked

with a spot like an eye, cures diseases of the eyes; celandine,

having a yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss, resembling a

snake's head, cures snakebite; red flannel, looking like blood,

cures blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's grease,

being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is

recommended to persons fearing baldness.[308]



[308] For a summary of the superstitions which arose under the

theological doctrine of signatures, see Dr. Eccles's admirable

little tract on the Evolution of Medical Science, p. 140; see

also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, p. 76.





Still another method evolved by this theological pseudoscience

was that of disgusting the demon with the body which he

tormented--hence the patient was made to swallow or apply to

himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines as the

livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibres of the

hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted

criminals.  Many of these were survivals of heathen

superstitions, but theologic reasoning wrought into them an

orthodox significance.  As an example of this mixture of heathen

with Christian magic, we may cite the following from a medieval

medical book as a salve against "nocturnal goblin visitors":

"Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat,

henbane, harewort, viper's bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek,

garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel.  Put these

worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them

nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep's grease, add much

holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running

water.  If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin

night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it

on his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently

with the sign of the cross.  His condition will soon be

better."[309]



[309] For a list of unmentionable ordures used in Germany near

the end of the seventeenth century, see Lammert, Volksmedizin und

medizinischer Aberglaube in Bayern, Wurzburg, 1869, p. 34, note.

For the English prescription given, see Cockayne, Leechdoms,

Wort-cunning, and Star-craft of Early England, in the Master of

the Rolls' series, London, 1865, vol. ii, pp. 345 and following.

Still another of these prescriptions given by Cockayne covers

three or four octavo pages.  For very full details of this sort

of sacred pseudo-science in Germany, with accounts of survivals

of it at the present time, see Wuttke, Prof. der Theologie in

Halle, Der Deutsche Volksaberglaube der Gegenwart, Berlin, 1869,

passim. For France, see Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation

francaise, pp. 371 et seq.





As to surgery, this same amalgamation of theology with survivals

of pagan beliefs continued to check the evolution of medical

science down to the modern epoch.  The nominal hostility of the

Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from

surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence

surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised

profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of

charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name

"barber-surgeon" was a survival of this.  In such surgery, the

application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of

the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled

poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.[310]



[310] On the low estate of surgery during the Middle Ages, see

the histories of medicine already cited, and especially

Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, Hamburg, 1890, pp.

216 et seq.





The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the

Church continued during century after century, and here probably

lay the main causes of hostility between the Church on the one

hand and the better sort of physicians on the other; namely, in

the fact that the Church supposed herself in possession of

something far better than scientific methods in medicine.  Under

the sway of this belief a natural and laudable veneration for the

relics of Christian martyrs was developed more and more into pure

fetichism.



Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped

was used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been

dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been

dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of

St. Gall cured tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St.

Christopher, throat diseases; St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid,

deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St. Apollonia, toothache;

St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the

maladies which bear their names.  Even as late as 1784 we find

certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a

mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert,

and not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical

cure.[311] In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted

by causing the invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had

washed his hands.  Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a

saint, when steeped in water, were supposed to be especially

efficacious in various diseases.  The pulpit everywhere dwelt

with unction on the reality of fetich cures, and among the choice

stories collected by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for the use of

preachers was one which, judging from its frequent recurrence in

monkish literature, must have sunk deep into the popular mind:

"Two lazy beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the

relics of St. Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may

not be healed and lose their claim to alms.  The blind man takes

the lame man on his shoulders to guide him, but they are caught

in the crowd and healed against their will."[312]



[311] See Baas, p. 614; aslo Biedermann.



[312] For the efficacy of flowers, see the Bollandist Lives of

the Saints, cited in Fort, p. 279; also pp. 457, 458.  For the

story of those unwillingly cured, see the Exempla of Jacques de

Vitry, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University,

London, 1890, pp. 52, 182.





Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the medical

virtues attributed to saliva.  The use of this remedy had early

Oriental sanction.  It is clearly found in Egypt.  Pliny devotes

a considerable part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved

it; Vespasian, when he visited Alexandria, is said to have cured

a blind man by applying saliva to his eves; but the great

example impressed most forcibly upon the medieval mind was the

use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus himself:  thence

it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely into medical

practice.[313]



[313] As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of

St. Angelo, and Other Essays, London, 1877, pp. 208 and

elsewhere.  For Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211;

see also the book of Tobit, chap. xi, 2-13.  For the case of

Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of Vespasian; also Tacitus,

Historiae, lib. iv, c. 81.  For its use by St. Francis Xavier,

see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, London,

1872.





As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every country had

its long list of saints, each with a special power over some one

organ or disease.  The clergy, having great influence over the

medical schools, conscientiously mixed this fetich medicine with

the beginnings of science.  In the tenth century, even at the

School of Salerno, we find that the sick were cured not only by

medicine, but by the relics of St. Matthew and others.



Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making

various pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them

to become unfashionable.  Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo

and St. Damian in great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but

out of fashion and without efficacy afterward, so we find in the

thirteenth century that the bones of St. Louis, having come into

fashion, wrought multitudes of cures, while in the fourteenth,

having become unfashionable, they ceased to act, and gave place

for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St.

Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until

they too became out of date and yielded to other saints.  Just so

in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost

prestige in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into

fashion.[314]



[314] For one of these lists of saints curing diseaes, see

Pettigrew, On Superstitions connected with Medicine; for another,

see Jacob, Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100; also Rydberg, p.

69; also Maury, Rambaud, and others.  For a comparison of

fashions in miracles with fashions in modern healing agents, see

Littre, Medecine et Medecins, pp. 118, 136 and elsewhere; also

Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143.





Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult

parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its

greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this

hour the ex votos hanging at such shrines as those of St.

Genevieve at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at

Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln and Lourdes, of the

fountain at La Salette, are survivals of this same conception of

disease and its cure.



So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots of

earth.  In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such sacred

centre; in England and Scotland there have been many; and as

late as 1805 the eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic

Church, gave a careful and earnest account of a miraculous cure

wrought at a sacred well in Flintshire.  In all parts of Europe

the pious resort to wells and springs continued long after the

close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely ceased to-day.

It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional deception in

the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures.  Although two

different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La

Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though

the recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed

the fact that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once

brought such great revenues to that shrine were assisted by

angelic voices spoken through a tube in the walls, not unlike the

pious machinery discovered in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii,

there is little doubt that the great majority of fountain and

even shrine cures, such as they have been, have resulted from a

natural law, and that belief in them was based on honest argument

from Scripture.  For the theological argument which thus stood in

the way of science was simply this:  if the Almighty saw fit to

raise the dead man who touched the bones of Elisha, why should he

not restore to life the patient who touches at Cologne the bones

of the Wise Men of the East who followed the star of the

Nativity?   If Naaman was cured by dipping himself in the waters

of the Jordan, and so many others by going down into the Pool of

Siloam, why should not men still be cured by bathing in pools

which men equally holy with Elisha have consecrated?   If one

sick man was restored by touching the garments of St. Paul, why

should not another sick man be restored by touching the seamless

coat of Christ at Treves, or the winding-sheet of Christ at

Besancon?   And out of all these inquiries came inevitably that

question whose logical answer was especially injurious to the

development of medical science:  Why should men seek to build up

scientific medicine and surgery, when relics, pilgrimages, and

sacred observances, according to an overwhelming mass of

concurrent testimony, have cured and are curing hosts of sick

folk in all parts of Europe?  [315]



[315] For sacred fountains in modern times, see Pettigrew, as

above, p. 42; also Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp.

82 and following; also Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, tome

iii, p. 323, note.  For those in Ireland, with many curious

details, see S. C. Hall, Ireland, its Scenery and Character,

London, 1841, vol. i, p. 282, and passim.  For the case in

Flintshire, see Authentic Documents relative to the Miraculous

Cure of Winifred White, of the Town of Wolverhampton, at

Holywell, Flintshire, on the 28th of June, 1805, by John Milner,

D. D., Vicar Apostolic, etc., London, 1805.  For sacred wells in

France, see Chevart, Histoire de Chartres, vol. i, pp. 84-89, and

French local histories generally.  For superstitions attaching to

springs in Germany, see Wuttke, Volksaberglaube, Sections 12 and

356.  For one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern

fiction, showing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous

powers at a fashionable spring in France, see Gustave Droz,

Autour d'une Source.  The reference to the old pious machinery at

Trondhjem is based upon personal observation by the present

writer in August, 1893.





Still another development of the theological spirit, mixed with

professional exclusiveness and mob prejudice, wrought untold

injury.  Even to those who had become so far emancipated from

allegiance to fetich cures as to consult physicians, it was

forbidden to consult those who, as a rule, were the best.  From a

very early period of European history the Jews had taken the lead

in medicine; their share in founding the great schools of

Salerno and Montpellier we have already noted, and in all parts

of Europe we find them acknowledged leaders in the healing art.

The Church authorities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were

especially severe against these benefactors:  that men who openly

rejected the means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably

lost, should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence;

preaching friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers

in state and church, while frequently secretly consulting them,

openly proscribed them.



Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been

partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin, sought

further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither

the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward.  Popes Eugene IV,

Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to

employ them.  The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the

Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of

Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and

the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in

the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful

to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as

John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against

them and all who consulted them.  As late as the middle of the

seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in

Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on

account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the

city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die

with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil."

Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even

popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.[316]



[316] For the general subject of the influence of theological

idea upon medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during

the Middle Ages, New York, 1883, chaps. xiii and xviii; also

Colin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Rambaud,

Histoire de la Civilisation francaise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, chap.

xviii; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 345, and elsewhere; also Baas

and others.  For proofs that the School of Salerno was not

founded by the monks, Benedictine or other, but by laymen, who

left out a faculty of theology from their organization, see

Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i, p. 646; also

Baas.  For a very strong statement that married professors,

women, and Jews were admitted to professional chairs, see Baas,

pp. 208 et seq.; also summary by Dr. Payne, article in the Encyc.

Brit.  Sprengel's old theory that the school was founded by

Benedictines seems now entirely given up; see Haeser and Bass on

the subject; also Daremberg, La Medecine, p. 133.  For the

citation from Gregory of Tours, see his Hist. Francorum, lib. vi.

For the eminence of Jewish physicians and proscription of them,

see Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, pp. 76-94; also

Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, et en Espagne, chaps.

v, viii, x, and xiii; also Renouard, Histoire de la Medecine,

Paris, 1846, tome i, p. 439; also especially Lammert,

Volksmedizin, etc., in Bayern, p. 6, note.  For Church decrees

against them, see the Acta Conciliorum, ed. Hardouin, vol. x, pp.

1634, 1700, 1870, 1873, etc.  For denunciations of them by Geiler

and others, see Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, pp.

194, 195.  For a list of kings and popes who persisted in having

Jewish physicians and for other curious information of the sort,

see Prof. Levi of Vercelli, Cristiani ed Ebrei nel Medio Evo, pp.

200-207; and for a very valuable summary, see Lecky, History of

Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, pp. 265-271.









VIII.  FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH.





The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of

medicine.  Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed his

own diseases to "devils' spells," declaring that "Satan produces

all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the prince of

death," and that "he poisons the air"; but that "no malady comes

from God."  From that day down to the faith cures of Boston, Old

Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar People" in our own time,

we see the results among Protestants of seeking the cause of

disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism.



Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from one

belief which has interfered with the evolution of medicine from

the dawn of Christianity until now.  When that troublesome

declaimer, Carlstadt, declared that "whoso falls sick shall use

no physic, but commit his case to God, praying that His will be

done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when you are hungry?" and the

answer being in the affirmative, he continued, "Even so you may

use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink is, or

whatever else we use for the preservation of life."  Hence it

was, doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more

ready than others to admit anatomical investigation by proper

dissections.[317]



[317] For Luther's belief and his answer to Carlstadt, see his

Table Talk, especially in Hazlitt's edition, pp. 250-257; also

his letters passim.  For recent "faith cures," see Dr. Buckley's

articles on Faith Healing and Kindred Phenomena, in The Century,

1886.  For the greater readiness of Protestant cities to

facilitate dissections, see Toth, Andreas Vesalius, p. 33.





Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in the

Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a

French germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of

the royal touch in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and

scrofula, the latter being consequently known as the king's evil.

This mode of cure began, so far as history throws light upon it,

with Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and came down

from reign to reign, passing from the Catholic saint to

Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with

ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.



Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming.  As a

simple matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the

history of the human race more thoroughly attested than those

wrought by the touch of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and

especially of that chosen vessel, Charles II.  Though Elizabeth

could not bring herself fully to believe in the reality of these

cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain, afterward Dean of

Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the cures

wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon.

Fuller, in his Church History, gives an account of a Roman

Catholic who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to

Protestantism.  Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by

James I.  Charles I also enjoyed the same power, in spite of the

public declaration against its reality by Parliament.  In one

case the King saw a patient in the crowd, too far off to be

touched, and simply said, "God bless thee and grant thee thy

desire"; whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours

disappeared from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of

medicine which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John

Nicholas, Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his

own knowledge to be every word of it true.



But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift is

found in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical

debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the advent of

George IV.  He touched nearly one hundred thousand persons, and

the outlay for gold medals issued to the afflicted on these

occasions rose in some years as high as ten thousand pounds.

John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St.

Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works on surgery

and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the touch

of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire

book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself

have been frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by

his Majesty's touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery,

and these many of them had tyred out the endeavours of able

chirurgeons before they came thither."  Yet it is especially

instructive to note that, while in no other reign were so many

people touched for scrofula, and in none were so many cures

vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of that

disease:  the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the

reason doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for

scientific means of cure.  This is but one out of many examples

showing the havoc which a scientific test always makes among

miracles if men allow it to be applied.



To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in the

words of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to

miracle--a working faith," something else seems required to

account for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the

royal touch upon babes in their mothers' arms.  Myth-making and

marvel-mongering were evidently at work here as in so many other

places, and so great was the fame of these cures that we find, in

the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at Portsmouth, New

Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable him to make

the voyage to England in order that he may be healed by the royal

touch.



The change in the royal succession does not seem to have

interfered with the miracle; for, though William III evidently

regarded the whole thing as a superstition, and on one occasion

is said to have touched a patient, saying to him, "God give you

better health and more sense," Whiston assures us that this

person was healed, notwithstanding William's incredulity.



As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery,

relates that several cases of scrofula which had been

unsuccessfully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard,

sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty, yielded afterward to the

efficacy of the Queen's touch.  Naturally does Collier, in his

Ecclesiastical History, say regarding these cases that to

dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny

our senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness."  Testimony

to the reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a

multitude of most sober scholars, divines, and doctors of

medicine declared the evidence absolutely convincing.  That the

Church of England accepted the doctrine of the royal touch is

witnessed by the special service provided in the Prayer-Book of

that period for occasions when the King exercised this gift.  The

ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp:  during the

reading of the service and the laying on of the King's hands, the

attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They shall lay

their hands on the sick, and they shall recover"; afterward came

special prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the blessing, and

finally his Majesty washed his royal hands in golden vessels

which high noblemen held for him.



In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony

to its efficacy.  On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king,

Louis XIV, touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles.



This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by

Catholics and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great

Britain, and in America; and it descended not only in spite of

the transition of the English kings from Catholicism to

Protestantism, but in spite of the transition from the legitimate

sovereignty of the Stuarts to the illegitimate succession of the

House of Orange.  And yet, within a few years after the whole

world held this belief, it was dead; it had shrivelled away in

the growing scientific light at the dawn of the eighteenth

century.[318]



[318] For the royal touch, see Becket, Free and Impartial Inquiry

into the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King's Evil,

1772, cited in Pettigrew, p. 128, and elsewhere; also Scoffern,

Science and Folk Lore, London, 1870, pp. 413 and following; also

Adams, The Healing Art, London, 1887, vol. i, pp. 53-60; and

especially Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chapter on

The Conversion of Rome; also his History of England in the

Eighteenth Century, vol. i, chap. i.  For curious details

regarding the mode of conducting the ceremony, see Evelyn's

Diary; also Lecky, as above. For the royal touch in France, and

for a claim to its possession in feudal times by certain noble

families, see Rambaud, Hist. de la Civ. francaise, p. 375.









IX.  THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY.





We may now take up the evolution of medical science out of the

medieval view and its modern survivals.  All through the Middle

Ages, as we have seen, some few laymen and ecclesiastics here and

there, braving the edicts of the Church and popular superstition,

persisted in medical study and practice:  this was especially

seen at the greater universities, which had become somewhat

emancipated from ecclesiastical control.  In the thirteenth

century the University of Paris gave a strong impulse to the

teaching of medicine, and in that and the following century we

begin to find the first intelligible reports of medical cases

since the coming in of Christianity.



In the thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy, the

Emperor Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by

granting, from time to time, permissions to dissect the human

subject.  In the centuries following, sundry other monarchs

timidly followed his example:  thus John of Aragon, in 1391, gave

to the University of Lerida the privilege of dissecting one dead

criminal every three years.[319]



[319] For the promotion of medical science and practice,

especially in the thirteenth century, by the universities, see

Baas, pp. 222-224.





During the fifteenth century and the earlier years of the

sixteenth the revival of learning, the invention of printing, and

the great voyages of discovery gave a new impulse to thought, and

in this medical science shared:  the old theological way of

thinking was greatly questioned, and gave place in many quarters

to a different way of looking at the universe.



In the sixteenth century Paracelsus appears--a great genius,

doing much to develop medicine beyond the reach of sacred and

scholastic tradition, though still fettered by many

superstitions.  More and more, in spite of theological dogmas,

came a renewal of anatomical studies by dissection of the human

subject.  The practice of the old Alexandrian School was thus

resumed.  Mundinus, Professor of Medicine at Bologna early in the

fourteenth century, dared use the human subject occasionally in

his lectures; but finally came a far greater champion of

scientific truth, Andreas Vesalius, founder of the modern science

of anatomy.  The battle waged by this man is one of the glories

of our race.



From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master.  In the search

for real knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers, and

especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of

the Church for ages.  As we have seen, even such men in the early

Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy in

abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII was

universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as

threatening excommunication against those practising it.  Through

this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite

ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession,

and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that

could give useful results.  No peril daunted him.  To secure

material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and

charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the

virus of the plague.  First of all men he began to place the

science of human anatomy on its solid modern foundations--on

careful examination and observation of the human body:  this was

his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered

even greater.



Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for

Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed

and gradually sinking.  Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon,

excellent men devoted all their energies to binding Christianity

to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they

insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas; so, in the

time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link Christianity

to Galen.  The cry has been the same in all ages; it is the same

which we hear in this age for curbing scientific studies:  the

cry for what is called "sound learning."  Whether standing for

Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against Erasmus, or for

Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for "sound learning":

the idea always has been that the older studies are "SAFE."



At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great

work on human anatomy.  With it ended the old and began the new;

its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science;

its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.



To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he

foresaw must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor

Charles V, and in his preface he argues for his method, and

against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text-books; he

also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and specimens

made by physicians who utterly refused to advance beyond the

ancient master.  The parrot-like repeaters of Galen gave battle

at once.  After the manner of their time their first missiles

were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been

exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons--weapons theologic.



In this case there were especial reasons why the theological

authorities felt called upon to intervene.  First, there was the

old idea prevailing in the Church that the dissection of the

human body is forbidden to Christians:  this was used with great

force against Vesalius, but he at first gained a temporary

victory; for, a conference of divines having been asked to

decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a

decision in the negative.



The reason was simple:  the great Emperor Charles V had made

Vesalius his physician and could not spare him; but, on the

accession of Philip II to the throne of Spain and the

Netherlands, the whole scene changed.  Vesalius now complained

that in Spain he could not obtain even a human skull for his

anatomical investigations:  the medical and theological

reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a

rule, had it in Spain ever since.  As late as the last years of

the eighteenth century an observant English traveller found that

there were no dissections before medical classes in the Spanish

universities, and that the doctrine of the circulation of the

blood was still denied, more than a century and a half after

Sarpi and Harvey had proved it.



Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius.  Throughout

the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone

imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible--the necessary nucleus

of the resurrection body.  Belief in a resurrection of the

physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians,

had been incorporated into the formula evolved during the early

Christian centuries and known as the Apostles' Creed, and was

held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere, and by all."

This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great veneration,

and many anatomists sought to discover it; but Vesalius,

revealing so much else, did not find it.  He contented himself

with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of

such a bone to the theologians.  He could not lie; he did not

wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.



The strength of this theological point may be judged from the

fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the

executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all

the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received

which fatally undermined this superstition.  Yet, in 1689 we find

it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the

Church to dissection.  Even as late as the eighteenth century,

Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly

undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are

renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn

upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to

the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake

of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his

collected works.[320]



[320] For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here

and there during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius,

Berlin, 1892, pp. 3, 13 et seq.  For religious antipathies as a

factor in the persecution of Vesalius, see the biographies by

Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725; Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also

Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest and most thorough of all, Roth,

as above.  Even Goethals, despite the timidity natural to a city

librarian in a town like Brussels, in which clerical power is

strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that there was a

certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment of

Vesalius.  See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale.  For the

resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes.

For Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la

Chirurgie, Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407.  For neglect of

dissection and opposition to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see

Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792, cited in Buckle, History of

Civilization in England, vol. ii, pp. 74, 75.  Also Henry Morley,

in his Clement Marot, and Other Essays.  For Bernouilli and his

trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien zur

Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95.  How different

Mundinus's practice of dissection was from that of Vesalius may

be seen by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire number of

dissections by the former was three; the usual statement is that

there were but two.  See Cuvier, Hist. des Sci. Nat., tome ii, p.

7; also Sprengel, Fredault, Hallam, and Littre.  Also Whewell,

Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol. iii, p. 328; also, for a

very full statement regarding the agency of Mundinus in the

progress of Anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, pp. 209-216.





Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by

the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius.  During

the Middle Ages there had been developed various theological

doctrines regarding the human body; these were based upon

arguments showing what the body OUGHT TO BE, and naturally,

when anatomical science showed what it IS, these doctrines fell.

An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen in a

widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year

in which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children,

instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had

twenty or twenty-two.  So, too, in Vesalius's time another

doctrine of this sort was dominant:  it had long been held that

Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out of

Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every man

than on the other.  This creation of Eve was a favourite subject

with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon his

beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals,

and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in

the first years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius

and the anatomists who followed him put an end among thoughtful

men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing this dealt a

blow at much else in the sacred theory.  Naturally, all these

considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism against the

innovators in anatomy.[321]



[321] As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the

Gesta Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis, . . . descripta a

magistro Rigardo, 1219, edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in

Histories Francorum Scriptores, tom. v, Paris, 1649, p. 24.  For

representations of Adam created by the Almighty out of a pile of

dust, and of Eve created from a rib of Adam, see the earlier

illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle.  As to the relation of

anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp. 154,

155.





A new weapon was now forged:  Vesalius was charged with

dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as

the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect

influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he

became a wanderer:  on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently

undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the

prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.



And yet not lost.  In this century a great painter has again

given him to us.  By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again

stands on earth, and we look once more into his cell.  Its

windows and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of

bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns

his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labours; the corpse

of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive;

his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which

strengthen us for the good fight in this age.[322]



[322] The original painting of Vesalius at work in his cell, by

Hamann, is now at Cornell University.





His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who conscientiously

supposed that he was injuring religion:  his poor, blind foes

aided in destroying one of religion's greatest apostles.  What

was his influence on religion?   He substituted, for the

repetition of worn-out theories, a conscientious and reverent

search into the works of the great Power giving life to the

universe; he substituted, for representations of the human

structure pitiful and unreal, representations revealing truths

most helpful to the whole human race.



The death of this champion seems to have virtually ended the

contest.  Licenses to dissect soon began to be given by sundry

popes to universities, and were renewed at intervals of from

three to four years, until the Reformation set in motion trains

of thought which did much to release science from this

yoke.[323]



[323] For a curious example of weapons drawn from Galen and used

against Vesalius, see Lewes, Life of Goethe, p. 343, note.  For

proofs that I have not overestimated Vesalius, see Portal, ubi

supra. Portal speaks of him as "le genie le plus droit qu'eut

l'Europe"; and again, "Vesale me parait un des plus grands hommes

qui ait existe."  For the charge that anatomists dissected living

men--against men of science before Vesalius's time--see Littre's

chapter on Anatomy.  For the increased liberty given anatomy by

the Reformation, see Roth's Vesalius, p. 33.









X.  THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION,

AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS.



I hasten now to one of the most singular struggles of medical

science during modern times.  Early in the last century Boyer

presented inoculation as a preventive of smallpox in France, and

thoughtful physicians in England, inspired by Lady Montagu and

Maitland, followed his example.  Ultra-conservatives in medicine

took fright at once on both sides of the Channel, and theology

was soon finding profound reasons against the new practice.  The

French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly condemned it; the

English theologians were most loudly represented by the Rev.

Edward Massey, who in 1772 preached and published a sermon

entitled The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation.  In

this he declared that Job's distemper was probably confluent

smallpox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil;

that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin;

and that the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical

operation."  Not less vigorous was the sermon of the Rev. Mr.

Delafaye, entitled Inoculation an Indefensible Practice.  This

struggle went on for thirty years.  It is a pleasure to note some

churchmen--and among them Madox, Bishop of Worcester--giving

battle on the side of right reason; but as late as 1753 we have

a noted rector at Canterbury denouncing inoculation from his

pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren following

his example.



The same opposition was vigorous in Protestant Scotland.  A large

body of ministers joined in denouncing the new practice as

"flying in the face of Providence," and "endeavouring to baffle a

Divine judgment."



On our own side of the ocean, also, this question had to be

fought out.  About the year 1721 Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a

physician in Boston, made an experiment in inoculation, one of

his first subjects being his own son.  He at once encountered

bitter hostility, so that the selectmen of the city forbade him

to repeat the experiment.  Foremost among his opponents was Dr.

Douglas, a Scotch physician, supported by the medical profession

and the newspapers.  The violence of the opposing party knew no

bounds; they insisted that inoculation was "poisoning," and they

urged the authorities to try Dr. Boylston for murder.  Having

thus settled his case for this world, they proceeded to settle it

for the next, insisting that "for a man to infect a family in the

morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against

the disease is blasphemy"; that the smallpox is "a judgment of

God on the sins of the people," and that "to avert it is but to

provoke him more"; that inoculation is "an encroachment on the

prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite."

Among the mass of scriptural texts most remote from any possible

bearing on the subject one was employed which was equally cogent

against any use of healing means in any disease--the words of

Hosea:  "He hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and

he will bind us up."



So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was in

danger; it was considered unsafe for him to be out of his house

in the evening; a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house

of Cotton Mather, who had favoured the new practice, and had

sheltered another clergyman who had submitted himself to it.



To the honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it should be

said that many of them were Boylston's strongest supporters.

Increase and Cotton Mather had been among the first to move in

favour of inoculation, the latter having called Boylston's

attention to it; and at the very crisis of affairs six of the

leading clergymen of Boston threw their influence on Boylston's

side and shared the obloquy brought upon him.  Although the

gainsayers were not slow to fling into the faces of the Mathers

their action regarding witchcraft, urging that their credulity in

that matter argued credulity in this, they persevered, and among

the many services rendered by the clergymen of New England to

their country this ought certainly to be remembered; for these

men had to withstand, shoulder to shoulder with Boylston and

Benjamin Franklin, the same weapons which were hurled at the

supporters of inoculation in Europe--charges of "unfaithfulness

to the revealed law of God."



The facts were soon very strong against the gainsayers:  within a

year or two after the first experiment nearly three hundred

persons had been inoculated by Boylston in Boston and

neighbouring towns, and out of these only six had died; whereas,

during the same period, out of nearly six thousand persons who

had taken smallpox naturally, and had received only the usual

medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died.  Yet even here

the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the

success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new

argument, and answered:  "It was good that Satan should be

dispossessed of his habitation which he had taken up in men in

our Lord's day, but it was not lawful that the children of the

Pharisees should cast him out by the help of Beelzebub.  We must

always have an eye to the matter of what we do as well as the

result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward God."  But

the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in the

New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and

in no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than

twenty years longer.[324]



[324] For the general subject, see Sprengel, Histoire de la

Medecine, vol. vi, pp. 39-80.  For the opposition of the Paris

faculty of Theology to inoculation, see the Journal de Barbier,

vol. vi, p. 294; also the Correspondance de Grimm et Diderot,

vol. iii, pp. 259 et seq.  For bitter denunciations of inoculation

by the English clergy, and for the noble stand against them by

Madox, see Baron, Life of Jenner, vol. i, pp. 231, 232, and vol.

ii, pp. 39, 40.  For the strenuous opposition of the same clergy,

see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 464, note;

also, for its comical side, see Nichol's Literary Illustrations,

vol. v, p. 800.  For the same matter in Scotland, see Lecky's

History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83.  For New

England, see Green, History of Medicine in Massachusetts, Boston,

1881, pp. 58 et seq; also chapter x of the Memorial History of

Boston, by the same author and O. W. Holmes.  For a letter of Dr.

Franklin's, see Massachusetts Historical Collections, second

series, vol. vii, p. 17.  Several most curious publications

issued during the heat of the inoculation controversy have been

kindly placed in my hands by the librarians of Harvard College

and of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among them A Reply

to Increase Mather, by John Williams, Boston, printed by J.

Franklin, 1721, from which the above scriptural arguments are

cited.  For the terrible virulence of the smallpox in New England

up to the introduction of the inoculation, see McMaster, History

of the People of the United States, first edition, vol. i, p. 30.





The steady evolution of scientific medicine brings us next to

Jenner's discovery of vaccination.  Here, too, sundry vague

survivals of theological ideas caused many of the clergy to side

with retrograde physicians.  Perhaps the most virulent of

Jenner's enemies was one of his professional brethren, Dr.

Moseley, who placed on the title-page of his book, Lues Bovilla,

the motto, referring to Jenner and his followers, "Father,

forgive them, for they know not what they do":  this book of Dr.

Moseley was especially indorsed by the Bishop of Dromore.  In

1798 an Anti-vaccination Society was formed by physicians and

clergymen, who called on the people of Boston to suppress

vaccination, as "bidding defiance to Heaven itself, even to the

will of God," and declared that "the law of God prohibits the

practice."  As late as 1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered

against vaccination in a sermon before the University of

Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against

Jenner; but Plumptre and the Rev. Rowland Hill in England,

Waterhouse in America, Thouret in France, Sacco in Italy, and a

host of other good men and true, pressed forward, and at last

science, humanity, and right reason gained the victory.  Most

striking results quickly followed.  The diminution in the number

of deaths from the terrible scourge was amazing.  In Berlin,

during the eight years following 1783, over four thousand

children died of the smallpox; while during the eight years

following 1814, after vaccination had been largely adopted, out

of a larger number of deaths there were but five hundred and

thirty-five from this disease.  In Wurtemberg, during the

twenty-four years following 1772, one in thirteen of all the

children died of smallpox, while during the eleven years after

1822 there died of it only one in sixteen hundred.  In

Copenhagen, during twelve years before the introduction of

vaccination, fifty-five hundred persons died of smallpox, and

during the sixteen years after its introduction only one hundred

and fifty-eight persons died of it throughout all Denmark.  In

Vienna, where the average yearly mortality from this disease had

been over eight hundred, it was steadily and rapidly reduced,

until in 1803 it had fallen to less than thirty; and in London,

formerly so afflicted by this scourge, out of all her inhabitants

there died of it in 1890 but one.  As to the world at large, the

result is summed up by one of the most honoured English

physicians of our time, in the declaration that "Jenner has

saved, is now saving, and will continue to save in all coming

ages, more lives in one generation than were destroyed in all the

wars of Napoleon."



It will have been noticed by those who have read this history

thus far that the record of the Church generally was far more

honourable in this struggle than in many which preceded it:  the

reason is not difficult to find; the decline of theology enured

to the advantage of religion, and religion gave powerful aid to

science.



Yet there have remained some survivals both in Protestantism and

in Catholicism which may be regarded with curiosity.  A small

body of perversely ingenious minds in the medical profession in

England have found a few ardent allies among the less

intellectual clergy.  The Rev. Mr. Rothery and the Rev. Mr.

Allen, of the Primitive Methodists, have for sundry vague

theological reasons especially distinguished themselves by

opposition to compulsory vaccination; but it is only just to say

that the great body of the English clergy have for a long time

taken the better view.



Far more painful has been the recent history of the other great

branch of the Christian Church--a history developed where it

might have been least expected:  the recent annals of the world

hardly present a more striking antithesis between Religion and

Theology.



On the religious side few things in the history of the Roman

Church have been more beautiful than the conduct of its clergy in

Canada during the great outbreak of ship-fever among immigrants

at Montreal about the middle of the present century.  Day and

night the Catholic priesthood of that city ministered fearlessly

to those victims of sanitary ignorance; fear of suffering and

death could not drive these ministers from their work; they laid

down their lives cheerfully while carrying comfort to the poorest

and most ignorant of our kind:  such was the record of their

religion.  But in 1885 a record was made by their theology.  In

that year the smallpox broke out with great virulence in

Montreal.  The Protestant population escaped almost entirely by

vaccination; but multitudes of their Catholic fellow-citizens,

under some vague survival of the old orthodox ideas, refused

vaccination; and suffered fearfully.  When at last the plague

became so serious that travel and trade fell off greatly and

quarantine began to be established in neighbouring cities, an

effort was made to enforce compulsory vaccination.  The result

was, that large numbers of the Catholic working population

resisted and even threatened bloodshed.  The clergy at first

tolerated and even encouraged this conduct:  the Abbe

Filiatrault, priest of St. James's Church, declared in a sermon

that, "if we are afflicted with smallpox, it is because we had a

carnival last winter, feasting the flesh, which has offended the

Lord; it is to punish our pride that God has sent us smallpox."

The clerical press went further:  the Etendard exhorted the

faithful to take up arms rather than submit to vaccination, and

at least one of the secular papers was forced to pander to the

same sentiment. The Board of Health struggled against this

superstition, and addressed a circular to the Catholic clergy,

imploring them to recommend vaccination; but, though two or three

complied with this request, the great majority were either silent

or openly hostile.  The Oblate Fathers, whose church was situated

in the very heart of the infected district, continued to denounce

vaccination; the faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional

exercises of various sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy

a great procession was ordered with a solemn appeal to the

Virgin, and the use of the rosary was carefully specified.



Meantime, the disease, which had nearly died out among the

Protestants, raged with ever-increasing virulence among the

Catholics; and, the truth becoming more and more clear, even to

the most devout, proper measures were at last enforced and the

plague was stayed, though not until there had been a fearful

waste of life among these simple-hearted believers, and germs of

scepticism planted in the hearts of their children which will

bear fruit for generations to come.[325]



[325] For the opposition of concientious men to vaccination in

England, see Baron, Life of Jenner, as above; also vol. ii, p.

43; also Dun's Life of Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 248, 249; also

Works of Sir J. Y. Simpson, vol. ii.  For a multitude of

statistics ahowing the diminution of smallpox after the

introduction of vaccination, see Russell, p. 380.  For the

striking record in London for 1890, see an article in the

Edinburgh review for January, 1891.  The general statement

referred to was made in a speech some years since by Sir Spencer

Wells.  For recent scattered cases of feeble opposition to

vaccination by Protestant ministers, see William White, The Great

Delusion, London, 1885, passim.  For opposition of the Roman

Catholic clergy and peasantry in Canada to vaccination during the

smallpox plague of 1885, see the English, Canadian, and American

newspapers, but especially the very temperate and accurate

correspondence in the New York Evening Post during September and

October of that year.





Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has allied

itself with the retrograde party in medical science is found in

the history of certain remedial agents; and first may be named

cocaine.  As early as the middle of the sixteenth century the

value of coca had been discovered in South America; the natives

of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent Jesuits, Joseph Acosta

and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view.  But the

conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the

Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of

South America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal

decree declaring that "the notions entertained by the natives

regarding it are an illusion of the devil."



As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older

Church came another committed by many Protestants.  In the early

years of the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in South

America learned from the natives the value of the so-called

Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague; and in 1638, the

Countess of Cinchon, Regent of Peru, having derived great benefit

from the new remedy, it was introduced into Europe.  Although its

alkaloid, quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach to a medical

specific, and has diminished the death rate in certain regions to

an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed by many

conservative members of the medical profession, and in this

opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of

hostility to the Roman Church.  In the heat of sectarian feeling

the new remedy was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil";

and so strong was this opposition that it was not introduced into

England until 1653, and even then its use was long held back,

owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling.



What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side could do

to help the world at this very time is seen in the fact that,

while this struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting to give

a scientific theory of the action of the devil in causing Job's

boils.  This effort at a quasi-scientific explanation which

should satisfy the theological spirit, comical as it at first

seems, is really worthy of serious notice, because it must be

considered as the beginning of that inevitable effort at

compromise which we see in the history of every science when it

begins to appear triumphant.[326]



[326] For the opposition of the South American Church authorities

to the introduction of coca, etc., see Martindale, Coca, Cocaine,

and its Salts, London, 1886, p. 7.  As to theological and

sectarian resistance to quinine, see Russell, pp. 194, 253; also

Eccles; also Meryon, History of Medicine, London, 1861, vol. i,

p. 74, note.  For the great decrease in deaths by fever after the

use of Peruvian bark began, see statistical tables given in

Russell, p. 252; and for Hoffmann's attempt at compromise, ibid.,

p. 294.





But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a Protestant

country.  In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who

afterward rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having

advocated the use of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases, was

immediately met by a storm of opposition.  This hostility flowed

from an ancient and time-honoured belief in Scotland.  As far

back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady of rank, being

charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for the relief of

pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned alive

on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old theological view

persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth century.  From

pulpit after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was denounced as

impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly,

the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform was "to

avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman."  Simpson wrote

pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he brought

into use; but he seemed about to be overcome, when he seized a

new weapon, probably the most absurd by which a great cause was

ever won:  "My opponents forget," he said, "the twenty-first

verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the record of the

first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves

that the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from

Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall

upon Adam."  This was a stunning blow, but it did not entirely

kill the opposition; they had strength left to maintain that the

"deep sleep of Adam took place before the introduction of pain

into the world--in a state of innocence."  But now a new champion

intervened--Thomas Chalmers:  with a few pungent arguments from

his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever, and the greatest

battle of science against suffering was won.  This victory was

won not less for religion.  Wisely did those who raised the

monument at Boston to one of the discoverers of anaesthetics

inscribe upon its pedestal the words from our sacred text, "This

also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in

counsel, and excellent in working."[327]



[327] For the case of Eufame Macalyane, se Dalyell, Darker

Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 130, 133. For the contest of

Simpson with Scotch ecclesiatical authorities, see Duns, Life of

Sir J. Y. Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 215-222, and 256-260.









XI.  FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE.





While this development of history was going on, the central idea

on which the whole theologic view rested--the idea of diseases as

resulting from the wrath of God or malice of Satan--was steadily

weakened; and, out of the many things which show this, one may

be selected as indicating the drift of thought among theologians

themselves.



Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent divines

of the American branch of the Anglican Church framed their Book

of Common Prayer.  Abounding as it does in evidences of their

wisdom and piety, few things are more noteworthy than a change

made in the exhortation to the faithful to present themselves at

the communion.  While, in the old form laid down in the English

Prayer Book, the minister was required to warn his flock not "to

kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us with divers

diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the American form all

this and more of similar import in various services was left out.



Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid indeed,

and at no period more so than during the last half of the

nineteenth century.



The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the

theological hold upon medical education has been almost entirely

relaxed.  In three great fields, especially, discoveries have

been made which have done much to disperse the atmosphere of

miracle. First, there has come knowledge regarding the relation

between imagination and medicine, which, though still defective,

is of great importance.  This relation has been noted during the

whole history of the science.  When the soldiers of the Prince of

Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of scurvy by

scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials

filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave

out that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of

such virtue that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a

gallon of water, and that it had been obtained from the East with

great difficulty and danger."  This statement, made with much

solemnity, deeply impressed the soldiers; they took the medicine

eagerly, and great numbers recovered rapidly.  Again, two

centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed to apply the

bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients at

Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for

disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application

of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by

this application alone, without any use of the gases whatever.

Innumerable cases of this sort have thrown a flood of light upon

such cures as those wrought by Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic

tractors," and by a multitude of other agencies temporarily in

vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous cures which in past

ages have been so frequent and of which a few survive.



The second department is that of hypnotism.  Within the last

half-century many scattered indications have been collected and

supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and

especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France.  Here, too,

great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred to

miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger, of

Augsburg, sounded an alarm.  He declared his fears "lest

accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"

denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the

singular argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly

incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to

consider it at all.  But investigations in hypnotism still go on,

and may do much in the twentieth century to carry the world yet

further from the realm of the miraculous.



In a third field science has won a striking series of victories.

Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwenhoek in the

seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the eighteenth,

and developed or applied with wonderful skill by Ehrenberg, Cohn,

Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and their compeers in

the nineteenth, has explained the origin and proposed the

prevention or cure of various diseases widely prevailing, which

until recently have been generally held to be "inscrutable

providences."  Finally, the closer study of psychology,especially

in its relations to folklore, has revealed processes involved in

the development of myths and legends:  the phenomena of

"expectant attention," the tendency to marvel-mongering, and the

feeling of "joy in believing."



In summing up the history of this long struggle between science

and theology, two main facts are to be noted:  First, that in

proportion as the world approached the "ages of faith" it receded

from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world has

receded from the "ages of faith" it has approached ascertained

truth; secondly, that, in proportion as the grasp of theology

Upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in proportion as

that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been developed.



The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical discoveries,

yet they have already taken from theology what was formerly its

strongest province--sweeping away from this vast field of human

effort that belief in miracles which for more than twenty

centuries has been the main stumblingblock in the path of

medicine; and in doing this they have cleared higher paths not

only for science, but for religion.[328]



[328] For the rescue of medical education from the control of

theology, especially in France, see Rambaud, La Civilisation

Contemporaine en France, pp. 682, 683.  For miraculous cures

wrought by imagination, see Tuke, Influence of Mind on Body, vol.

ii.  For opposition to the scientific study of hypnotism, see

Hypnotismus und Wunder: ein Vortrag, mit Weiterungen, von Max

Steigenberger, Domprediger, Augsburg, 1888, reviewed in Science,

Feb. 15, 1889, p. 127.  For a recent statement regarding the

development of studies in hypnotism, see Liegeois, De la

Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs rapports avec la

Jurisprudence, Paris, 1889, chap. ii.  As to joy in believing and

exaggerating marvels, see in the London Graphic for January 2,

1892, an account of Hindu jugglers by "Professor" Hofmann,

himself an expert conjurer.  He shows that the Hindu performances

have been grossly and persistently exaggerated in the accounts of

travellers; that they are easily seen through, and greatly

inferior to the jugglers' tricks seen every day in European

capitals.  The eminent Prof. De Gubernatis, who also had

witnessed the Hindu performances, assured the present writer that

the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated.  As to

the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most

important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for

perhaps the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers

Middleton, D. D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which

are supposed to have subsisted in the Christian Church, London,

1749.  For probably the most judicially fair discussion, see

Lecky, History of European Morals, vol. i, chap. iii; also his

Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chaps. i and ii; and for perhaps

the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements, see Max

Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the

University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv.  See

also, for very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's

Literature and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent

utterance of great clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address

before the Johns Hopkins University, given in Science for March

27, 1891.