Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

44
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
Still another development of the theological spirit, mixed
with professional exclusiveness and mob prejudice, wrought
untold injury. Even to those who had become so far ema
cipated from allegiance to fetich cures as to consult phys;
cians, it was forbidden to consult those who, as a rule, wer
the best. From a very early period of European history th
Jews had taken the lead in medicine ; their share in foun
ing the great schools of Salerno and Montpellier we have
already noted, and in all parts of Europe we find them ac-
^
knowledged leaders in the healing art. The Church autho^l
ities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were especially severe "
against these benefactors : that men who openly rejected the
means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably lost,
should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence ; preach-
ing friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers in
state and church, while frequently secretly consulting them, i
openly proscribed them.
Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having
been partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin
sought further aid from a Jewish physician, with the resul
that neither the saint nor the Jew could help him afterwarf
Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especial^
forbade Christians to employ them. The Trullanean Coun
cil in the eighth century, the Councils of B6ziers and A\\
in the thirteenth, the Councils of Avignon and Salamanca f
the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and the Bishop of Pai
sau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in the sixteenth
with many others, expressly forbade the faithful to call Jev
ish physicians or surgeons ; such great preachers as Joh
Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit again;
them and all who consulted them. As late as the middle <
the seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, i
Wiirtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physicir
ffistoire de Chartres, vol. i, pp. 84-89, and French local histories generally. P
superstitions attaching to springs in Germany, see Wuttke, Volksaberglaube, %%
and 356. For one of the most exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction, sho
ing perfectly the recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring
France, see Gustave Droz, Autour d'utie Source. The reference to the old pi
machinery at Trondhjem is based upon personal observation by the present wri
in August, 1893.