Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/26

16 VIII against those guilty of dissections was simply a development of this feeling.

Still further, in spite of the fearful cruelties which the Church, when firmly established, promoted so freely against those suspected of witchcraft or heresy, there grew up a theory which took shape in the maxim that "the Church abhors the shedding of blood," and this maxim was used with deadly effect against the progress of surgery. It led to ecclesiastical mandates which withdrew from this branch of the healing art the most thoughtful and cultivated men of the middle ages, and which placed surgery in the hands of the lowest class of nomadic charlatans. So deeply was this idea thus rooted in the universal Church that for over a thousand years surgical practice was considered dishonorable; the greatest monarchs were often unable to secure an ordinary surgical operation; and it was only in 1406 that a better beginning was made, when the Emperor Wenzel of Germany ordered that dishonor should no longer attach to the surgical profession.

In spite of all these opposing forces, the evolution of medical science continued, though but slowly. In the second century of the Christian era Galen had made himself a great authority at Rome, and from Rome had swayed the medical science of the world: his genius triumphed over the defects of his method; but, though he gave a powerful impulse to medicine, his dogmatism stood in the way of it long afterward.

The places where medicine, such as it thus became, could be applied, were at first mainly the infirmaries of various monasteries, especially the larger ones of the Benedictine Order. These were frequently developed into hospitals: many monks devoted themselves to such medical studies as were permitted, and sundry churchmen and laymen did much to secure and preserve copies of ancient medical treatises. So, too, in the cathedral schools established by Charlemagne and others, provision was generally made for medical teaching; but all this instruction, whether in convents or schools, was wretchedly poor. It consisted not in the development by individual thought and experiment of the gifts of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, but almost entirely in the parrot-like repetition of their writings.

But while the inherited ideas of church leaders were thus unfavorable to any proper development of medical science, there were two bodies of men outside the Church who, though largely fettered by superstition, were far less so than the monks and students of ecclesiastical schools: these were the Jews and the Mohammedans. The first of these especially had inherited many