Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/25

Rh walls as the relics of St. Gereon and his Theban band of martyrs! Again, at the neighboring church of St. Ursula, we have the later spoils of another cemetery, covering the interior walls of the church as the bones of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgin martyrs: the fact that anatomists now declare many of them to be the bones of men does not appear in the middle ages to have diminished their power of competing with the relics at the other shrines in healing efficiency.

Other developments of fetich cure were no less discouraging to the evolution of medical science. Very important among these was the Agnus Dei, or piece of wax from the Paschal candles stamped with the figure of a lamb, and consecrated by the pope. As late as 1471 Pope Paul II expatiated to the Church on the efficacy of this fetich in preserving men from fire, shipwreck, tempest, lightning, and hail, and in assisting women in childbirth; and he reserved to himself and his successors the manufacture of it.

Naturally the frame of mind thus stimulated created a necessity for amulets and charms of other kinds; and under this influence we find a reversion to old pagan fetiches: nothing on the whole stood more constantly in the way of any proper development of medical science than these fetich cures, whose efficacy was based on theological modes of reasoning.

It would be expecting too much from human nature to imagine that pontiffs who derived large revenues from the sale of the Agnus Dei, or that priests who derived both wealth and honors from cures wrought at shrines under their care, or that lay dignitaries who had invested heavily in relics should favor the development of any science which undermined their interests. Moreover, other developments of thought in the Church were hardly less fatal to the evolution of medical science.

First of these was a wide-spread Egyptian and Oriental theory, mainly transmitted through the Jewish sacred books, of the unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. And when to this was added the mysterious idea of the human body as the temple of the Holy Ghost, and a dread of interfering with it lest some injury might result in its final resurrection at the day of judgment, there came an addition to the mysterious reasons which forbade men to pursue the study of anatomy by means of dissection. Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus as a butcher; Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in similar terms. The threat of excommunication launched by Pope