Page:A short history of social life in England.djvu/120

100 by rough barbers with no anæsthetics. Faith healing still played a large part in the cure of Middle Age maladies, and so deeply-rooted was the idea that prayer and intercession, combined with a concoction of herbs from the monastery gardens, would heal the sick, that it was deemed a want of faith to employ other remedies. "It is better," they said, "to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men," a beneficial reflection, when one considers for a moment what the "hands of men" meant. A strange mixture of magic and superstition, astrology and astronomy, logic and alchemy, seemed to be necessary for the medieval doctor. Men had a firm belief in the relation between the human body and planets, and medicine was administered according to planetary influence only. Chaucer's physician is well "groundit in astronomy"

The famous medical schools at Salerno "supplied the fires from which the other nations lit their torches" during the eleventh, twelfth, and