Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

42
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
the sick were cured not only by medicine, but by the relics
of St. Matthew and others.
Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making
various pious cures fashionable for a time and then
allowing them to become unfashionable. Just as we see the
relics of St. Cosmo and St. Damian in great vogue during
the early Middle Ages, but out of fashion and without effi-
cacy afterward, so we find in the thirteenth century that the
bones of St. Louis, having come into fashion, wrought multitudes
of cures, while in the fourteenth, having become unfashionable,
they ceased to act, and gave place for a time to
the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St. Catherine of
Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until they
too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so
in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost
prestige in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come
into fashion.*
Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult
parturition, in which modern science has achieved some
of its greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics ;
and
to this hour the ex votos hanging at such shrines as those of
St. Genevieve at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid
image at Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln and Lourdes
of the fountain at La Salette, are survivals of this same con
ception of disease and its cure.
So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, anc
spots of earth. In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had on<
such sacred centre; in England and Scotland there hav
been many; and as late as 1805 the eminent Dr. Milner, c
the Roman Catholic Church, gave a careful and earnest ac
count of a miraculous cure wrought at a sacred well in Flil
shire. In all parts of Europe the pious resort to wells
springs continued long after the close of the Middle Af
and has not entirely ceased to-day.
It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional deceptic
For one of these lists of saints curing diseases, see Pettigrew, On Supers
tions connected with Afedicine; for another, see Jacob, Superstitions P.-^: '-'-. j
96-100 ; also Rydberg, p. 6g ; also Maury, Rambaud, and others. Vo
son of fashions in miracles with fashions in modem healing agents, see i.itt
Midecine et M/decins, pp. u8, 136, and elsewhere ; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143
I