254 TH E INTELLECTUAL RISE IN ELECTRICITY. 



ignorant edicts : whereof numbers do escape with less 

 difficulty than they did in the Roman proscriptions." 1 

 Yet the reproach brought against the Asclepiades that 

 they "resigned themselves to visionary speculations, and 

 obeyed the instincts of their understandings rather in 

 crude meditations on the essence of things, the origin of 

 the world, the nature of God and the soul of man, than in 

 developing a practical and useful system of medicine" 2 

 often repeated against the mediaeval physicians, has little 

 justice in it. Like all knowledge depending upon phys- 

 ical investigation, that of the human body lay under the 

 ban of ecclesiastical control. Ceremonies and relics and 

 consecrated specifics, amulets, miracle-working images, and 

 a celestial faculty recruited from the ranks of the saints 

 such were the means too often relied upon to meet the 

 fearful diseases which flourished under conditions which 

 favored every form of contagion and infection. "Afflictions 

 sent by Providence" and "demoniac possessions" were 

 terms which readily veiled the density of the existing 

 ignorance. Man, it was insisted, must not investigate the 

 structure of his own frame with the scalpel, since this 

 argued contempt for the doctrine of final resurrection. 

 Medical practice must be first of all orthodox. Supernat- 

 uralism must prevail, and the struggling lunatic dealt with 

 through book and holy water, rather than through reme- 

 dies ministering to the mind diseased. Progress in any 

 department of the healing art could hardly be expected 

 in such circumstances. 



Hence, while extended allusion to the therapeutic em- 

 ployment of both the magnet and the amber in the Middle 

 Ages has been made in the preceding pages, it would be 

 incorrect to infer that the advancement of magnetic or 

 electrical knowledge was materially accelerated by such 

 use. In fact, so long as the principal value of the lode- 

 stone lay in its utility as "a means of expelling gross 



1 Bacon : De Augmentis, ii., x, 5. 



2 Meryon : The History of Medicine, London, 1861. 



