Page:Medicine and the church; being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick (IA medicinechurchbe00rhodiala).pdf/139

 we have a strong hereditary interest, since scientific medicine took its origin in a system of faith-healing beside which all our modern attempts are feeble imitations Once or twice in each century the serpent entwining the staff of Æsculapius gets restless, contorts, and in his gambols swallows his tail, and all at once in full circle back upon us come old thoughts and old practices which for a time dominate alike doctors and laity. As a profession we took origin in the cult of Aesculapius whose temples were at once magnificent shrines and hospitals Amid lovely surroundings, chosen for their salubrity, and connected with famous springs, they were the sanatoriums of the ancient world. The ritual of the cure is well known, and has been beautifully described by Pater in Marius the Epicurean The popular shrines of the Catholic Church to-day are in some ways the direct descendants of this Æsculapian cult, and the cures and votive offerings at Lourdes and Ste. Anne are in every way analogous to those of Epidaurus.'

Osler goes on to speak with much tenderness of the apparently ineradicable nature of the credulity evinced not merely by the multitude but by persons educated widely, if not well, in the matter of the healing of disease. It is indeed a portentous fact. The