Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/329

 as the year 1270, Arnold had attained considerable celebrity as a physician. Between the years 1289 and 1299 he appears to have made his home in Montpellier, and to have been very actively engaged both as a practicing physician and as a teacher of medicine. It was in that city also that he wrote the more important of his numerous medical treatises. At a later period of his life he appears largely to have lost his interest in medicine, for in 1299 we find him acting as an ambassador from the King of Aragon, whose private physician he was, to the Court of Philippe le Bel, King of France, and deeply entangled, during his stay in Paris, in disputes with the theologians of that city respecting certain religious doctrines. He was also at the same time busily engaged in championing various ecclesiastic reforms which he was anxious to see inaugurated. His opponents haled him before the tribunal of the Inquisition and succeeded in having him cast into prison, where he remained until he expressed a willingness to retract the obnoxious opinions which he had advanced. The same tribunal pronounced his treatise "De Adventu Antichristi" to be heretical. After these persecutions Arnold endeavored to procure aid and comfort from Popes Boniface VIII. and Benedict XI. The former was inclined in his favor, but Benedict manifested no disposition to aid him. Boniface's sentiments were doubtless influenced by the fact that Arnold had treated him successfully for stone in the bladder; and Neuburger incidentally states that, in the effecting of this cure, not only medical and dietetic treatment had been employed, but also two other measures—viz., the application of a bandage or truss which encircled the loins snugly, and the wearing (by the patient) of a magic seal ring upon which was engraved the effigy of a lion. When Pope Clement V. (1305-1315 A. D.) removed the papal seat from Rome to Avignon, in France, Arnold was relieved from the charge of heresy and reinstated in the respect of his contemporaries. He became the trusted adviser of royalty, won the sympathy of Jayme II. and of his brother, Frederic III., King of Sicily,