NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 15 



walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his Theban band of martyrs ! 

 Again, at the neighboring 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 anatomists now declare many of them to 

 be 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. 



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. 

 As late as 1471 Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the 

 efficacy of this fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, 

 tempest, lightning, and hail, and in assisting women in childbirth ; 

 and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture 

 of it. 



Naturally the frame of mind thus stimulated created a neces- 

 sity for amulets and charms of other kinds ; and under this influ- 

 ence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches : nothing on the 

 whole stood more constantly in the way of any proper develop- 

 ment of medical science than these fetich cures, whose efficacy 

 was based on theological modes of reasoning. 



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 that priests who derived both wealth and honors 

 from cures wrought at shrines under their care, or that lay digni- 

 taries who had invested heavily in relics should favor the devel- 

 opment of any science which undermined their interests.* More- 

 over, other developments of thought in the Church were hardly 

 less fatal to the evolution of medical science. 



First of these was a wide-spread Egyptian and Oriental theory, 

 mainly transmitted through the Jewish sacred books, of the un- 

 lawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. And when 

 to this was added the mysterious idea of the human body as the 

 temple of the Holy Ghost, and a dread of interfering with it lest 

 some injury might result in its final resurrection at the day of 

 judgment, there came an addition to the mysterious reasons which 

 forbade men to pursue the study of anatomy by means of dis- 

 section. Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a 

 butcher ; Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in similar 

 terms. The threat of excommunication launched by Pope Boni- 



* See Fort's Medical Economy durinc the Middle Ages, pages 211-213 ; also the Hand- 

 books of Murray and Baedeker for North Germany, and various histories of medicine pas- 

 sim ; also Collin de Plancy and scores of others. For an account of the Agnus Dei, see 

 Kydberg, pp. 62, 63. 



