146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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, Ubi sunt tres medici, ibi sunt duo athei* 



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 scientific methods ; in the 

 eleventh century this charge nearly cost the life of Constantino 

 Africanus when he broke from the beaten path of medicine; 

 in the thirteenth it gave Roger Bacon, one of the greatest bene- 

 factors 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." f 



The effect of this wide-spread ecclesiastical opposition was, 

 that for many centuries the study of medicine was confined 

 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 theo- 

 logical 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 center 

 of wit. 



Closely connected with these methods of thought was the doc- 

 trine 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, 



* [Where there are three physicians there are two atheists.] See Daunou, cited by 

 Buckle in the Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 580. 



f See Renan, Averroes et l'Averroisme, Paris, 1867, 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. 



