THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JUNE, 1891 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



XII. MIRACLES AND MEDICINE. 



Br ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL.D., L.H. D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



PART II. 



WE have seen that during the middle ages, while various 

 churchmen, building better than they knew, did some- 

 thing to lay foundations for medical study, the Church authori- 

 ties, 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 everywhere 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 unbecom- 

 ing 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 arose 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 Pope Innocent III, about the beginning of the 

 thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of excom- 

 munication, to undertake medical treatment without calling in 

 ecclesiastical advice. 



VOL. XXXIX. 12 



