NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 149 



medical virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had 

 early Orieutal 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 eyes ; 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.* 



As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every coun- 

 try 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 medi- 

 cine 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 four- 

 teenth, 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 cures until they too became out of date and yielded to other 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, f 



Even such serious matters as fractures, calculus, 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. Gene- 

 vieve at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at 

 Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln, in the cave of Lourdes, 

 nay, even at the fountain of La Salette, in spite of the fact that 



* 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 ; 

 s^e also the Book of Tobit, chap, xi, 2-13. For the case of Vespasian, see Suetonius, 

 Life of Vespasian ; also Tacitus, Historia, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St. Francis Xavier, 

 see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, London, 1872. 



f For one of these lists of saints curing diseases, see Pettigrew, Medical Superstitions 

 of the Middle Ages ; for another, see Jacob, Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100 ; also 

 Rydberg, p. 69; also Maury, Eambaud, and others. For a comparison of fashions in 

 miracles with fashions in modern healing agents, see Littre, Medecine et Medecius, pp. 

 118, 136, and elsewhere; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143. 



