Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

36
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
medicine were for ages well kept under by the theological
spirit. As far back as the sixth century so great a man as
Pope Gregory I showed himself hostile to the development
of this science. In the beginning of the twelfth century the
Council of Rheims interdicted the study of law and physic
to monks, and a multitude of other councils enforced this
decree. About the middle of the same century St. Bernard
still complained that monks had too much to do with medi-
and a few years later we have decretals like those of
cine ;
Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise
it. For many generations there appear evidences of a desire
among
the more broad-minded churchmen to allow the cul
tivation of medical science among ecclesiastics : Popes like
Clement III and Sylvester II seem to have favoured this,
and we even hear of an Archbishop of Canterbury skilled in
medicine but in the ;
beginning of the thirteenth century the
Fourth Council of the Lateran forbade surgical operations
to be practised by priests, deacons, and subdeacons; and
some years later Honorius III reiterated this decree and
extended it. In 1243 the Dominican order forbade medical
treatises to be brought into their monasteries, and finally all
participation of ecclesiastics in the science and art of raedi-jil
cine was '
effectually prevented.*
VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.
While various churchmen, building better than they
knew, thus did something to lay foundations for medical]
study,
II
the Church authorities, as a rule, did even more to]
thwart it among the very men who, had they been allowed'
liberty, would have cultivated it to the highest advantage.
For statements as to these decrees of the highest Church and monastic authori>
ties against medicine and surgery, see Sprengel, Baas, Geschichte der Medicin, p^ M
204, and elsewhere ; also Buckle, Posthumous Works, vol. ii, p. 567. For a longf f
list of Church dignitaries who practised a semi-theological medicine in the Middle
Ages, see Baas, pp. 204, 205. For Bertharius, Ilildegard, and others mentioned,
see also Sprengel and other historians of medicine. For clandestine study and 1
practice of medicine by sundry ecclesiastics in spite of the prohibitions by the
Church, see Von Raumer, Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 438. For some remarks on this
subject by an eminent and learned ecclesiastic, see Ricker, O. S. B., professor in
the University of Vienna, Pastoral-Psychiatrie, \Vien, 1894, pp. 12, 13.