4 3 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity re- 

 sulted from protection by Satan, and that this favor was repaid 

 and the pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Chris- 

 tians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were made 

 in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Sa- 

 tan, and stop the plague by torture and murder of the Jews. 

 Throughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of extensive 

 burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the time of the 

 "black death," it is computed that twelve thousand Jews thus 

 perished ; in the small town of Erfurt, the number is said to have 

 been three thousand ; in Strasburg the Rue Brulee remains as a 

 monument to the two thousand Jews burned in it for poisoning the 

 wells and causing the plague of 1348 ; at the royal castle of Chi- 

 non, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing 

 wood, and in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were 

 burned. Everywhere in continental Europe this mad persecution 

 went on ; but it is a pleasure to say that one man, Pope Clement 

 VI, stood against this mass of popular unreason, and, so far as he 

 could bring his influence to bear on the maddened populace, it was 

 exercised in favor of mercy to these supposed enemies of the Al- 

 mighty.* 



As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of 

 pestilence also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured 

 into the early Church from Oriental sources, and was strength- 

 ened by a whole line of church authorities, fathers, doctors, and 

 saints ; but, above all, by the great bull, " Summis Desiderantes," 

 issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the 

 seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that 

 witches are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which 



* For an early conception in India of the Divinity acting through medicine, see The 

 Bhagavadgita, translated by Telang, p. 82, in Max Miiller's Sacred Books of the East. For 

 the necessity of religious means of securing knowledge of medicine, see the Anagita, trans- 

 lated by Telang, in Max Miiller's Sacred Books of the East, p. 388. For ancient Persian 

 ideas of sickness as sent by the spirit of evil and to be cured by spells, but not excluding 

 medicine and surgery, and for sickness generally as caused by the evil principle in demons, 

 see the Zend-Avesta, Darmesteter's translation, in Max Miiller's Sacred Books of the East, 

 introduction passim, but especially xciii. For diseases wrought by witchcraft, see Zend- 

 Avesta, Darmesteter's translation, pp. 230 and 293. On the preference of spells in heal- 

 ing over medicine and surgery, see Zend-Avesta, vol. i, pp. 85, 86. For healing by magic 

 in ancient Greece see, e. g., the cure of Ulysses in the Odyssey, " They stopped the black 

 blood by a spell " (Odyssey, xix, 457). For medicine in Egypt as partly priestly and partly 

 in the hands of physicians, see Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, p. 136, note. For ideas of 

 curing of diseases by expulsion of demons still surviving among various tribes and nations 

 of Asia, see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, a Study of Comparative Religion, London, 

 1890, pp. 184-192. For the flagellants and their processions at the time of the black death, 

 see Lea, History of the Inquisition, New York, 1888, vol. ii, p. 381 et seq. For the perse- 

 cution of the Jews in time of pestilence, see ibid., p. 379 and following, with authorities in 

 the notes. 



