The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the Church

continued during century after century, and here probably lay the main

causes of hostility between the Church on the one hand and the better

sort of physicians on the other; namely, in the fact that the Church

supposed herself in possession of something far better than scientific

methods in medicine. Under the sway of this belief a natural and

laudable veneration for the relics of Christian martyrs was developed

more and more into pure fetichism.

Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped was

used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been dipped

cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured

lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured

tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher, throat diseases;

St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St.

Apollonia, toothache; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other

saints, the maladies which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we

find certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a

mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert, and

not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical cure.(311)

In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted by causing the

invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had washed his hands.

Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a saint, when steeped in water,

were supposed to be especially efficacious in various diseases. The

pulpit everywhere dwelt with unction on the reality of fetich cures, and

among the choice stories collected by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for

the use of preachers was one which, judging from its frequent recurrence

in monkish literature, must have sunk deep into the popular mind: "Two

lazy beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the relics of St.

Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may not be healed

and lose their claim to alms. The blind man takes the lame man on his

shoulders to guide him, but they are caught in the crowd and healed

against their will."(312)

(311) See Baas, p. 614; also Biedermann.

(312) For the efficacy of flowers, see the Bollandist Lives of the

Saints, cited in Fort, p. 279; also pp. 457, 458. For the story of those

unwillingly cured, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Prof.

T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, London, 1890, pp. 52, 182.

Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the medical

virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had early Oriental

sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny devotes a considerable

part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved it; Vespasian, when he

visited Alexandria, is said to have cured a blind man by applying saliva

to his eves; but the great example impressed most forcibly upon the

medieval mind was the use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus

himself: thence it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely

into medical practice.(313)

(313) As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of St.

Angelo, and Other Essays, London, 1877, pp. 208 and elsewhere. For

Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211; see also the book of

Tobit, chap. xi, 2-13. For the case of Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of

Vespasian; also Tacitus, Historiae, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St.

Francis Xavier, see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier,

London, 1872.

As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every country had its

long list of saints, each with a special power over some one organ or

disease. The clergy, having great influence over the medical schools,

conscientiously mixed this fetich medicine with the beginnings of

science. In the tenth century, even at the School of Salerno, we find

that 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

efficacy 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.(314)

(314) For one of these lists of saints curing diseaes, see Pettigrew,

On Superstitions connected with Medicine; for another, see Jacob,

Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100; also Rydberg, p. 69; also Maury,

Rambaud, and others. For a comparison of fashions in miracles with

fashions in modern healing agents, see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, pp.

118, 136 and elsewhere; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143.

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 conception of disease and its cure.

So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots of earth.

In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such sacred centre; in

England and Scotland there have been many; and as late as 1805 the

eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic Church, gave a careful

and earnest account of a miraculous cure wrought at a sacred well in

Flintshire. In all parts of Europe the pious resort to wells and springs

continued long after the close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely

ceased to-day. It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional

deception in the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures. Although

two different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La

Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though the

recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed the fact

that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once brought such

great revenues to that shrine were assisted by angelic voices spoken

through a tube in the walls, not unlike the pious machinery discovered

in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, there is little doubt that the great

majority of fountain and even shrine cures, such as they have been, have

resulted from a natural law, and that belief in them was based on honest

argument from Scripture. For the theological argument which thus stood

in the way of science was simply this: if the Almighty saw fit to raise

the dead man who touched the bones of Elisha, why should he not restore

to life the patient who touches at Cologne the bones of the Wise Men of

the East who followed the star of the Nativity? If Naaman was cured by

dipping himself in the waters of the Jordan, and so many others by

going down into the Pool of Siloam, why should not men still be cured by

bathing in pools which men equally holy with Elisha have consecrated?

If one sick man was restored by touching the garments of St. Paul, why

should not another sick man be restored by touching the seamless coat of

Christ at Treves, or the winding-sheet of Christ at Besancon? And out of

all these inquiries came inevitably that question whose logical answer

was especially injurious to the development of medical science: Why

should men seek to build up scientific medicine and surgery,

when relics, pilgrimages, and sacred observances, according to an

overwhelming mass of concurrent testimony, have cured and are curing

hosts of sick folk in all parts of Europe? (315)

(315) For sacred fountains in modern times, see Pettigrew, as above,

p. 42; also Dalyell, Darker Superstitions of Scotland, pp. 82 and

following; also Montalembert, Les Moines d'Occident, tome iii, p. 323,

note. For those in Ireland, with many curious details, see S. C. Hall,

Ireland, its Scenery and Character, London, 1841, vol. i, p. 282, and

passim. For the case in Flintshire, see Authentic Documents relative to

the Miraculous Cure of Winifred White, of the Town of Wolverhampton, at

Holywell, Flintshire, on the 28th of June, 1805, by John Milner, D. D.,

Vicar Apostolic, etc., London, 1805. For sacred wells in France, see

Chevart, Histoire de Chartres, vol. i, pp. 84-89, and French local

histories generally. For superstitions attaching to springs in Germany,

see Wuttke, Volksaberglaube, Sections 12 and 356. For one of the most

exquisitely wrought works of modern fiction, showing perfectly the

recent evolution of miraculous powers at a fashionable spring in France,

see Gustave Droz, Autour d'une Source. The reference to the old pious

machinery at Trondhjem is based upon personal observation by the present

writer in August, 1893.

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 emancipated from allegiance to

fetich cures as to consult physicians, it was forbidden to consult those

who, as a rule, were the best. From a very early period of European

history the Jews had taken the lead in medicine; their share in founding

the great schools of Salerno and Montpellier we have already noted, and

in all parts of Europe we find them acknowledged leaders in the healing

art. The Church authorities, 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; preaching friars

denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers in state and church,

while frequently secretly consulting them, 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 result that neither the saint nor the Jew

could help him afterward. Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Calixtus III

especially forbade Christians to employ them. The Trullanean Council in

the eighth century, the Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth,

the Councils of Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod

of Bamberg and the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council

of Avignon in the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the

faithful to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as

John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against them

and all who consulted them. As late as the middle of the seventeenth

century, when the City Council of Hall, in Wurtemberg, gave some

privileges to a Jewish physician "on account of his admirable experience

and skill," the clergy of the city joined in a protest, declaring that

"it were better to die with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor

aided by the devil." Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals,

kings, and even popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated

race.(316)

(316) For the general subject of the influence of theological idea upon

medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during the Middle

Ages, New York, 1883, chaps. xiii and xviii; also Colin de Plancy,

Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Rambaud, Histoire de la

Civilisation francaise, Paris, 1885, vol. i, chap. xviii; also Sprengel,

vol. ii, p. 345, and elsewhere; also Baas and others. For proofs that

the School of Salerno was not founded by the monks, Benedictine or

other, but by laymen, who left out a faculty of theology from their

organization, see Haeser, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin, vol. i,

p. 646; also Baas. For a very strong statement that married professors,

women, and Jews were admitted to professional chairs, see Baas, pp.

208 et seq.; also summary by Dr. Payne, article in the Encyc. Brit.

Sprengel's old theory that the school was founded by Benedictines

seems now entirely given up; see Haeser and Bass on the subject; also

Daremberg, La Medecine, p. 133. For the citation from Gregory of Tours,

see his Hist. Francorum, lib. vi. For the eminence of Jewish physicians

and proscription of them, see Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris,

1824, pp. 76-94; also Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, et

en Espagne, chaps. v, viii, x, and xiii; also Renouard, Histoire de

la Medecine, Paris, 1846, tome i, p. 439; also especially Lammert,

Volksmedizin, etc., in Bayern, p. 6, note. For Church decrees against

them, see the Acta Conciliorum, ed. Hardouin, vol. x, pp. 1634, 1700,

1870, 1873, etc. For denunciations of them by Geiler and others, see

Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, pp. 194, 195. For a list of

kings and popes who persisted in having Jewish physicians and for other

curious information of the sort, see Prof. Levi of Vercelli, Cristiani

ed Ebrei nel Medio Evo, pp. 200-207; and for a very valuable summary,

see Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, pp. 265-271.

VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of medicine.

Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed his own diseases to

"devils' spells," declaring that "Satan produces all the maladies which

afflict mankind, for he is the prince of death," and that "he poisons

the air"; but that "no malady comes from God." From that day down to

the faith cures of Boston, Old Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar

People" in our own time, we see the results among Protestants of seeking

the cause of disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism.

Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from one belief

which has interfered with the evolution of medicine from the dawn of

Christianity until now. When that troublesome declaimer, Carlstadt,

declared that "whoso falls sick shall use no physic, but commit his case

to God, praying that His will be done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when

you are hungry?" and the answer being in the affirmative, he continued,

"Even so you may use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink

is, or whatever else we use for the preservation of life." Hence it was,

doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more ready than

others to admit anatomical investigation by proper dissections.(317)

(317) For Luther's belief and his answer to Carlstadt, see his Table

Talk, especially in Hazlitt's edition, pp. 250-257; also his letters

passim. For recent "faith cures," see Dr. Buckley's articles on Faith

Healing and Kindred Phenomena, in The Century, 1886. For the greater

readiness of Protestant cities to facilitate dissections, see Toth,

Andreas Vesalius, p. 33.

Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in the

Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a French

germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of the royal touch

in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and scrofula, the latter being

consequently known as the king's evil. This mode of cure began, so

far as history throws light upon it, with Edward the Confessor in the

eleventh century, and came down from reign to reign, passing from the

Catholic saint to Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with

ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.

Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming. As a simple

matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the history of the

human race more thoroughly attested than those wrought by the touch

of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and especially of that chosen

vessel, Charles II. Though Elizabeth could not bring herself fully to

believe in the reality of these cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain,

afterward Dean of Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the

cures wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon.

Fuller, in his Church History, gives an account of a Roman Catholic

who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to Protestantism.

Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by James I. Charles I also

enjoyed the same power, in spite of the public declaration against its

reality by Parliament. In one case the King saw a patient in the crowd,

too far off to be touched, and simply said, "God bless thee and grant

thee thy desire"; whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours

disappeared from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of

medicine which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John Nicholas,

Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his own knowledge to

be every word of it true.

But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous gift is found

in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly cynical debauchee who

ever sat on the English throne before the advent of George IV. He

touched nearly one hundred thousand persons, and the outlay for gold

medals issued to the afflicted on these occasions rose in some years

as high as ten thousand pounds. John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his

Majesty and to St. Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works

on surgery and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the

touch of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire

book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself have been

frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by his Majesty's

touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery, and these many of

them had tyred out the endeavours of able chirurgeons before they came

thither." Yet it is especially instructive to note that, while in no

other reign were so many people touched for scrofula, and in none were

so many cures vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of

that disease: the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the reason

doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for scientific

means of cure. This is but one out of many examples showing the havoc

which a scientific test always makes among miracles if men allow it to

be applied.

To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in the words

of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to miracle--a working

faith," something else seems required to account for the testimony

of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the royal touch upon babes in their

mothers' arms. Myth-making and marvel-mongering were evidently at work

here as in so many other places, and so great was the fame of these

cures that we find, in the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at

Portsmouth, New Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable

him to make the voyage to England in order that he may be healed by the

royal touch.

The change in the royal succession does not seem to have interfered with

the miracle; for, though William III evidently regarded the whole

thing as a superstition, and on one occasion is said to have touched

a patient, saying to him, "God give you better health and more sense,"

Whiston assures us that this person was healed, notwithstanding

William's incredulity.

As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his Art of Surgery, relates

that several cases of scrofula which had been unsuccessfully treated

by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard, sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty,

yielded afterward to the efficacy of the Queen's touch. Naturally does

Collier, in his Ecclesiastical History, say regarding these cases that

to dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny our

senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness." Testimony to the

reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a multitude of most

sober scholars, divines, and doctors of medicine declared the evidence

absolutely convincing. That the Church of England accepted the doctrine

of the royal touch is witnessed by the special service provided in the

Prayer-Book of that period for occasions when the King exercised this

gift. The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp: during

the reading of the service and the laying on of the King's hands, the

attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They shall lay their

hands on the sick, and they shall recover"; afterward came special

prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the blessing, and finally his

Majesty washed his royal hands in golden vessels which high noblemen

held for him.

In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony to

its efficacy. On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king, Louis XIV,

touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles.

This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by Catholics

and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great Britain, and in

America; and it descended not only in spite of the transition of the

English kings from Catholicism to Protestantism, but in spite of

the transition from the legitimate sovereignty of the Stuarts to the

illegitimate succession of the House of Orange. And yet, within a

few years after the whole world held this belief, it was dead; it had

shrivelled away in the growing scientific light at the dawn of the

eighteenth century.(318)

(318) For the royal touch, see Becket, Free and Impartial Inquiry into

the Antiquity and Efficacy of Touching for the King's Evil, 1772, cited

in Pettigrew, p. 128, and elsewhere; also Scoffern, Science and Folk

Lore, London, 1870, pp. 413 and following; also Adams, The Healing

Art, London, 1887, vol. i, pp. 53-60; and especially Lecky, History of

European Morals, vol. i, chapter on The Conversion of Rome; also his

History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i, chap. i. For

curious details regarding the mode of conducting the ceremony, see

Evelyn's Diary; also Lecky, as above. For the royal touch in France, and

for a claim to its possession in feudal times by certain noble families,

see Rambaud, Hist. de la Civ. francaise, p. 375.

IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY.

We may now take up the evolution of medical science out of the medieval

view and its modern survivals. All through the Middle Ages, as we have

seen, some few laymen and ecclesiastics here and there, braving the

edicts of the Church and popular superstition, persisted in

medical study and practice: this was especially seen at the greater

universities, which had become somewhat emancipated from ecclesiastical

control. In the thirteenth century the University of Paris gave a strong

impulse to the teaching of medicine, and in that and the following

century we begin to find the first intelligible reports of medical cases

since the coming in of Christianity.

In the thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy, the Emperor

Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by granting, from

time to time, permissions to dissect the human subject. In the centuries

following, sundry other monarchs timidly followed his example: thus John

of Aragon, in 1391, gave to the University of Lerida the privilege of

dissecting one dead criminal every three years.(319)

(319) For the promotion of medical science and practice, especially in

the thirteenth century, by the universities, see Baas, pp. 222-224.

During the fifteenth century and the earlier years of the sixteenth the

revival of learning, the invention of printing, and the great voyages

of discovery gave a new impulse to thought, and in this medical science

shared: the old theological way of thinking was greatly questioned,

and gave place in many quarters to a different way of looking at the

universe.

In the sixteenth century Paracelsus appears--a great genius, doing much

to develop medicine beyond the reach of sacred and scholastic tradition,

though still fettered by many superstitions. More and more, in spite of

theological dogmas, came a renewal of anatomical studies by dissection

of the human subject. The practice of the old Alexandrian School was

thus resumed. Mundinus, Professor of Medicine at Bologna early in the

fourteenth century, dared use the human subject occasionally in his

lectures; but finally came a far greater champion of scientific truth,

Andreas Vesalius, founder of the modern science of anatomy. The battle

waged by this man is one of the glories of our race.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the search for real

knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge

of sacrilege, founded upon the teachings of the Church for ages. As

we have seen, even such men in the early Church as Tertullian and St.

Augustine held anatomy in abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface

VIII was universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as

threatening excommunication against those practising it. Through

this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite

ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession, and

popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that could

give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure material for his

investigations, he haunted gibbets and charnel-houses, braving the fires

of the Inquisition and the virus of the plague. First of all men

he began to place the science of human anatomy on its solid modern

foundations--on careful examination and observation of the human

body: this was his first great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one

considered even greater.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done for

Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are doomed and

gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger Bacon, excellent men

devoted all their energies to binding Christianity to Aristotle; just

as, in the time of Reuchlin and Erasmus, they insisted on binding

Christianity to Thomas Aquinas; so, in the time of Vesalius, such men

made every effort to link Christianity to Galen. The cry has been the

same in all ages; it is the same which we hear in this age for curbing

scientific studies: the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether

standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against Erasmus, or

for Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for "sound learning": the

idea always has been that the older studies are "SAFE."

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great

work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new; its

researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science; its

illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which he foresaw

must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor Charles V, and in

his preface he argues for his method, and against the parrot repetitions

of the mediaeval text-books; he also condemns the wretched anatomical

preparations and specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to

advance beyond the ancient master. The parrot-like repeaters of Galen

gave battle at once. After the manner of their time their first missiles

were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been exhausted,

they began to use sharper weapons--weapons theologic.

In this case there were especial reasons why the theological authorities

felt called upon to intervene. First, there was the old idea prevailing

in the Church that the dissection of the human body is forbidden to

Christians: this was used with great force against Vesalius, but he at

first gained a temporary victory; for, a conference of divines having

been asked to decide whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege,

gave a decision in the negative.

The reason was simple: the great Emperor Charles V had made Vesalius his

physician and could not spare him; but, on the accession of Philip II

to the throne of Spain and the Netherlands, the whole scene changed.

Vesalius now complained that in Spain he could not obtain even a human

skull for his anatomical investigations: the medical and theological

reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a rule,

had it in Spain ever since. As late as the last years of the eighteenth

century an observant English traveller found that there were no

dissections before medical classes in the Spanish universities, and that

the doctrine of the circulation of the blood was still denied, more than

a century and a half after Sarpi and Harvey had proved it.

Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius. Throughout

the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in man a bone

imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible--the necessary nucleus of

the resurrection body. Belief in a resurrection of the physical body,

despite St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians, had been incorporated

into the formula evolved during the early Christian centuries and known

as the Apostles' Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always,

everywhere, and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held

in great veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but

Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented himself

with saying that he left the question regarding the existence of such a

bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not wish to fight the

Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from the fact that

no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the executioner to find

out whether, when he burned a criminal, all the parts were consumed;

and only then was the answer received which fatally undermined this

superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find it still lingering in France,

stimulating opposition in the Church to dissection. Even as late as the

eighteenth century, Bernouilli having shown that the living human body

constantly undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are

renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn upon

him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to the doctrine

of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake of peace he struck

out his argument on this subject from his collected works.(320)

(320) For permissions to dissect the human subject, given here and there

during the Middle Ages, see Roth's Andreas Vesalius, Berlin, 1892, pp.

3, 13 et seq. For religious antipathies as a factor in the persecution

of Vesalius, see the biographies by Boerhaave and Albinos, 1725;

Burggraeve's Etudes, 1841; also Haeser, Kingsley, and the latest

and most thorough of all, Roth, as above. Even Goethals, despite the

timidity natural to a city librarian in a town like Brussels, in which

clerical power is strong and relentless, feels obliged to confess that

there was a certain admixture of religious hatred in the treatment

of Vesalius. See his Notice Biographique sur Andre Vesale. For the

resurrection bones, see Roth, as above, pp. 154, 155, and notes. For

Vesalius, see especially Portal, Hist. de l'Anatomie et de la Chirurgie,

Paris, 1770, tome i, p. 407. For neglect of dissection and opposition

to Harvey's discovery in Spain, see Townsend's Travels, edition of 1792,

cited in Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. ii, pp. 74,

75. Also Henry Morley, in his Clement Marot, and Other Essays. For

Bernouilli and his trouble with the theologians, see Wolf, Biographien

zur Culturgeschichte der Schweiz, vol. ii, p. 95. How different

Mundinus's practice of dissection was from that of Vesalius may be seen

by Cuvier's careful statement that the entire number of dissections by

the former was three; the usual statement is that there were but two.

See Cuvier, Hist. des Sci. Nat., tome ii, p. 7; also Sprengel, Fredault,

Hallam, and Littre. Also Whewell, Hist. of the Inductive Sciences, vol.

iii, p. 328; also, for a very full statement regarding the agency of

Mundinus in the progress of Anatomy, see Portal, vol. i, pp. 209-216.

Still other encroachments upon the theological view were made by the new

school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius. During the Middle Ages

there had been developed various theological doctrines regarding the

human body; these were based upon arguments showing what the body OUGHT

TO BE, and naturally, when anatomical science showed what it IS, these

doctrines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning is seen

in a widespread belief of the twelfth century, that, during the year in

which the cross of Christ was captured by Saladin, children, instead of

having thirty or thirty-two teeth as before, had twenty or twenty-two.

So, too, in Vesalius's time another doctrine of this sort was dominant:

it had long been held that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a

rib taken out of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side

of every man than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite

subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it upon

his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of missals, and

even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious books in the first

years after the invention of printing; but Vesalius and the anatomists

who followed him put an end among thoughtful men to this belief in the

missing rib, and in doing this dealt a blow at much else in the sacred

theory. Naturally, all these considerations brought the forces of

ecclesiasticism against the innovators in anatomy.(321)

(321) As to the supposed change in the number of teeth, see the Gesta

Philippi Augusti Francorum Regis,... descripta a magistro Rigardo, 1219,

edited by Father Francois Duchesne, in Histories Francorum Scriptores,

tom. v, Paris, 1649, p. 24. For representations of Adam created by the

Almighty out of a pile of dust, and of Eve created from a rib of Adam,

see the earlier illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle. As to the

relation of anatomy to theology as regards to Adam's rib, see Roth, pp.

154, 155.

A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with dissecting a

living man, and, either from direct persecution, as the great majority

of authors assert, or from indirect influences, as the recent apologists

for Philip II admit, he became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy

Land, apparently undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked,

and in the prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.

And yet not lost. In this century a great painter has again given him to

us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again stands on earth,

and we look once more into his cell. Its windows and doors, bolted and

barred within, betoken the storm of bigotry which rages without; the

crucifix, toward which he turns his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which

he labours; the corpse of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases

to be repulsive; his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas,

which strengthen us for the good fight in this age.(322)

(322) The original painting of Vesalius at work in his cell, by Hamann,

is now at Cornell University.

His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who conscientiously

supposed that he was injuring religion: his poor, blind foes aided in

destroying one of religion's greatest apostles. What was his influence

on religion? He substituted, for the repetition of worn-out theories,

a conscientious and reverent search into the works of the great Power

giving life to the universe; he substituted, for representations of the

human structure pitiful and unreal, representations revealing truths

most helpful to the whole human race.

The death of this champion seems to have virtually ended the contest.

Licenses to dissect soon began to be given by sundry popes to

universities, and were renewed at intervals of from three to four years,

until the Reformation set in motion trains of thought which did much to

release science from this yoke.(323)

(323) For a curious example of weapons drawn from Galen and used against

Vesalius, see Lewes, Life of Goethe, p. 343, note. For proofs that I

have not overestimated Vesalius, see Portal, ubi supra. Portal speaks of

him as "le genie le plus droit qu'eut l'Europe"; and again, "Vesale me

parait un des plus grands hommes qui ait existe." For the charge

that anatomists dissected living men--against men of science before

Vesalius's time--see Littre's chapter on Anatomy. For the increased

liberty given anatomy by the Reformation, see Roth's Vesalius, p. 33.

X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION, AND THE USE OF

ANAESTHETICS.

I hasten now to one of the most singular struggles of medical science

during modern times. Early in the last century Boyer presented

inoculation as a preventive of smallpox in France, and thoughtful

physicians in England, inspired by Lady Montagu and Maitland, followed

his example. Ultra-conservatives in medicine took fright at once on both

sides of the Channel, and theology was soon finding profound reasons

against the new practice. The French theologians of the Sorbonne

solemnly condemned it; the English theologians were most loudly

represented by the Rev. Edward Massey, who in 1772 preached and

published a sermon entitled The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of

Inoculation. In this he declared that Job's distemper was probably

confluent smallpox; that he had been inoculated doubtless by the devil;

that diseases are sent by Providence for the punishment of sin; and that

the proposed attempt to prevent them is "a diabolical operation."

Not less vigorous was the sermon of the Rev. Mr. Delafaye, entitled

Inoculation an Indefensible Practice. This struggle went on for thirty

years. It is a pleasure to note some churchmen--and among them Madox,

Bishop of Worcester--giving battle on the side of right reason; but as

late as 1753 we have a noted rector at Canterbury denouncing inoculation

from his pulpit in the primatial city, and many of his brethren

following his example.

The same opposition was vigorous in Protestant Scotland. A large body of

ministers joined in denouncing the new practice as "flying in the face

of Providence," and "endeavouring to baffle a Divine judgment."

On our own side of the ocean, also, this question had to be fought out.

About the year 1721 Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a physician in Boston, made an

experiment in inoculation, one of his first subjects being his own son.

He at once encountered bitter hostility, so that the selectmen of the

city forbade him to repeat the experiment. Foremost among his opponents

was Dr. Douglas, a Scotch physician, supported by the medical profession

and the newspapers. The violence of the opposing party knew no bounds;

they insisted that inoculation was "poisoning," and they urged the

authorities to try Dr. Boylston for murder. Having thus settled his case

for this world, they proceeded to settle it for the next, insisting that

"for a man to infect a family in the morning with smallpox and to

pray to God in the evening against the disease is blasphemy"; that the

smallpox is "a judgment of God on the sins of the people," and that

"to avert it is but to provoke him more"; that inoculation is "an

encroachment on the prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound

and smite." Among the mass of scriptural texts most remote from any

possible bearing on the subject one was employed which was equally

cogent against any use of healing means in any disease--the words of

Hosea: "He hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will

bind us up."

So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was in danger; it

was considered unsafe for him to be out of his house in the evening; a

lighted grenade was even thrown into the house of Cotton Mather, who had

favoured the new practice, and had sheltered another clergyman who had

submitted himself to it.

To the honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it should be said

that many of them were Boylston's strongest supporters. Increase and

Cotton Mather had been among the first to move in favour of inoculation,

the latter having called Boylston's attention to it; and at the very

crisis of affairs six of the leading clergymen of Boston threw their

influence on Boylston's side and shared the obloquy brought upon him.

Although the gainsayers were not slow to fling into the faces of the

Mathers their action regarding witchcraft, urging that their credulity

in that matter argued credulity in this, they persevered, and among the

many services rendered by the clergymen of New England to their country

this ought certainly to be remembered; for these men had to withstand,

shoulder to shoulder with Boylston and Benjamin Franklin, the

same weapons which were hurled at the supporters of inoculation in

Europe--charges of "unfaithfulness to the revealed law of God."

The facts were soon very strong against the gainsayers: within a year

or two after the first experiment nearly three hundred persons had been

inoculated by Boylston in Boston and neighbouring towns, and out of

these only six had died; whereas, during the same period, out of nearly

six thousand persons who had taken smallpox naturally, and had received

only the usual medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died. Yet even

here the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the

success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new argument,

and answered: "It was good that Satan should be dispossessed of his

habitation which he had taken up in men in our Lord's day, but it was

not lawful that the children of the Pharisees should cast him out by the

help of Beelzebub. We must always have an eye to the matter of what we

do as well as the result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward

God." But the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in

the New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and in

no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than twenty years

longer.(324)

(324) For the general subject, see Sprengel, Histoire de la Medecine,

vol. vi, pp. 39-80. For the opposition of the Paris faculty of Theology

to inoculation, see the Journal de Barbier, vol. vi, p. 294; also the

Correspondance de Grimm et Diderot, vol. iii, pp. 259 et seq. For bitter

denunciations of inoculation by the English clergy, and for the noble

stand against them by Madox, see Baron, Life of Jenner, vol. i, pp. 231,

232, and vol. ii, pp. 39, 40. For the strenuous opposition of the same

clergy, see Weld, History of the Royal Society, vol. i, p. 464, note;

also, for its comical side, see Nichol's Literary Illustrations, vol.

v, p. 800. For the same matter in Scotland, see Lecky's History of the

Eighteenth Century, vol. ii, p. 83. For New England, see Green, History

of Medicine in Massachusetts, Boston, 1881, pp. 58 et seq; also chapter

x of the Memorial History of Boston, by the same author and O. W.

Holmes. For a letter of Dr. Franklin's, see Massachusetts Historical

Collections, second series, vol. vii, p. 17. Several most curious

publications issued during the heat of the inoculation controversy have

been kindly placed in my hands by the librarians of Harvard College and

of the Massachusetts Historical Society, among them A Reply to Increase

Mather, by John Williams, Boston, printed by J. Franklin, 1721, from

which the above scriptural arguments are cited. For the terrible

virulence of the smallpox in New England up to the introduction of the

inoculation, see McMaster, History of the People of the United States,

first edition, vol. i, p. 30.

The steady evolution of scientific medicine brings us next to Jenner's

discovery of vaccination. Here, too, sundry vague survivals of

theological ideas caused many of the clergy to side with retrograde

physicians. Perhaps the most virulent of Jenner's enemies was one of his

professional brethren, Dr. Moseley, who placed on the title-page of his

book, Lues Bovilla, the motto, referring to Jenner and his followers,

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do": this book of

Dr. Moseley was especially indorsed by the Bishop of Dromore. In 1798

an Anti-vaccination Society was formed by physicians and clergymen,

who called on the people of Boston to suppress vaccination, as "bidding

defiance to Heaven itself, even to the will of God," and declared that

"the law of God prohibits the practice." As late as 1803 the Rev. Dr.

Ramsden thundered against vaccination in a sermon before the University

of Cambridge, mingling texts of Scripture with calumnies against

Jenner; but Plumptre and the Rev. Rowland Hill in England, Waterhouse in

America, Thouret in France, Sacco in Italy, and a host of other good

men and true, pressed forward, and at last science, humanity, and right

reason gained the victory. Most striking results quickly followed.

The diminution in the number of deaths from the terrible scourge was

amazing. In Berlin, during the eight years following 1783, over four

thousand children died of the smallpox; while during the eight years

following 1814, after vaccination had been largely adopted, out of a

larger number of deaths there were but five hundred and thirty-five

from this disease. In Wurtemberg, during the twenty-four years following

1772, one in thirteen of all the children died of smallpox, while

during the eleven years after 1822 there died of it only one in sixteen

hundred. In Copenhagen, during twelve years before the introduction of

vaccination, fifty-five hundred persons died of smallpox, and during the

sixteen years after its introduction only one hundred and fifty-eight

persons died of it throughout all Denmark. In Vienna, where the average

yearly mortality from this disease had been over eight hundred, it was

steadily and rapidly reduced, until in 1803 it had fallen to less than

thirty; and in London, formerly so afflicted by this scourge, out of

all her inhabitants there died of it in 1890 but one. As to the world

at large, the result is summed up by one of the most honoured English

physicians of our time, in the declaration that "Jenner has saved, is

now saving, and will continue to save in all coming ages, more lives in

one generation than were destroyed in all the wars of Napoleon."

It will have been noticed by those who have read this history thus far

that the record of the Church generally was far more honourable in this

struggle than in many which preceded it: the reason is not difficult to

find; the decline of theology enured to the advantage of religion, and

religion gave powerful aid to science.

Yet there have remained some survivals both in Protestantism and in

Catholicism which may be regarded with curiosity. A small body of

perversely ingenious minds in the medical profession in England have

found a few ardent allies among the less intellectual clergy. The Rev.

Mr. Rothery and the Rev. Mr. Allen, of the Primitive Methodists, have

for sundry vague theological reasons especially distinguished themselves

by opposition to compulsory vaccination; but it is only just to say

that the great body of the English clergy have for a long time taken the

better view.

Far more painful has been the recent history of the other great branch

of the Christian Church--a history developed where it might have been

least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly present a more

striking antithesis between Religion and Theology.

On the religious side few things in the history of the Roman Church have

been more beautiful than the conduct of its clergy in Canada during

the great outbreak of ship-fever among immigrants at Montreal about the

middle of the present century. Day and night the Catholic priesthood of

that city ministered fearlessly to those victims of sanitary ignorance;

fear of suffering and death could not drive these ministers from their

work; they laid down their lives cheerfully while carrying comfort to

the poorest and most ignorant of our kind: such was the record of their

religion. But in 1885 a record was made by their theology. In that year

the smallpox broke out with great virulence in Montreal. The Protestant

population escaped almost entirely by vaccination; but multitudes of

their Catholic fellow-citizens, under some vague survival of the old

orthodox ideas, refused vaccination; and suffered fearfully. When at

last the plague became so serious that travel and trade fell off greatly

and quarantine began to be established in neighbouring cities, an effort

was made to enforce compulsory vaccination. The result was, that large

numbers of the Catholic working population resisted and even threatened

bloodshed. The clergy at first tolerated and even encouraged this

conduct: the Abbe Filiatrault, priest of St. James's Church, declared in

a sermon that, "if we are afflicted with smallpox, it is because we had

a carnival last winter, feasting the flesh, which has offended the Lord;

it is to punish our pride that God has sent us smallpox." The clerical

press went further: the Etendard exhorted the faithful to take up arms

rather than submit to vaccination, and at least one of the secular

papers was forced to pander to the same sentiment. The Board of Health

struggled against this superstition, and addressed a circular to the

Catholic clergy, imploring them to recommend vaccination; but, though

two or three complied with this request, the great majority were either

silent or openly hostile. The Oblate Fathers, whose church was situated

in the very heart of the infected district, continued to denounce

vaccination; the faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional exercises

of various sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy a great procession

was ordered with a solemn appeal to the Virgin, and the use of the

rosary was carefully specified.

Meantime, the disease, which had nearly died out among the Protestants,

raged with ever-increasing virulence among the Catholics; and, the truth

becoming more and more clear, even to the most devout, proper measures

were at last enforced and the plague was stayed, though not until there

had been a fearful waste of life among these simple-hearted believers,

and germs of scepticism planted in the hearts of their children which

will bear fruit for generations to come.(325)

(325) For the opposition of concientious men to vaccination in England,

see Baron, Life of Jenner, as above; also vol. ii, p. 43; also Dun's

Life of Simpson, London, 1873, pp. 248, 249; also Works of Sir J. Y.

Simpson, vol. ii. For a multitude of statistics ahowing the diminution

of smallpox after the introduction of vaccination, see Russell, p.

380. For the striking record in London for 1890, see an article in the

Edinburgh review for January, 1891. The general statement referred to

was made in a speech some years since by Sir Spencer Wells. For recent

scattered cases of feeble opposition to vaccination by Protestant

ministers, see William White, The Great Delusion, London, 1885, passim.

For opposition of the Roman Catholic clergy and peasantry in Canada

to vaccination during the smallpox plague of 1885, see the English,

Canadian, and American newspapers, but especially the very temperate and

accurate correspondence in the New York Evening Post during September

and October of that year.

Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has allied itself

with the retrograde party in medical science is found in the history of

certain remedial agents; and first may be named cocaine. As early as the

middle of the sixteenth century the value of coca had been discovered

in South America; the natives of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent

Jesuits, Joseph Acosta and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view.

But the conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the

Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of South

America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal decree declaring

that "the notions entertained by the natives regarding it are an

illusion of the devil."

As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the older Church

came another committed by many Protestants. In the early years of the

seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in South America learned

from the natives the value of the so-called Peruvian bark in the

treatment of ague; and in 1638, the Countess of Cinchon, Regent of Peru,

having derived great benefit from the new remedy, it was introduced into

Europe. Although its alkaloid, quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach

to a medical specific, and has diminished the death rate in certain

regions to an amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed

by many conservative members of the medical profession, and in this

opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of hostility

to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian feeling the new remedy

was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil"; and so strong was this

opposition that it was not introduced into England until 1653, and even

then its use was long held back, owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling.

What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side could do to

help the world at this very time is seen in the fact that, while this

struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting to give a scientific

theory of the action of the devil in causing Job's boils. This effort

at a quasi-scientific explanation which should satisfy the theological

spirit, comical as it at first seems, is really worthy of serious

notice, because it must be considered as the beginning of that

inevitable effort at compromise which we see in the history of every

science when it begins to appear triumphant.(326)

(326) For the opposition of the South American Church authorities to

the introduction of coca, etc., see Martindale, Coca, Cocaine, and its

Salts, London, 1886, p. 7. As to theological and sectarian resistance to

quinine, see Russell, pp. 194, 253; also Eccles; also Meryon, History of

Medicine, London, 1861, vol. i, p. 74, note. For the great decrease in

deaths by fever after the use of Peruvian bark began, see statistical

tables given in Russell, p. 252; and for Hoffmann's attempt at

compromise, ibid., p. 294.

But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a Protestant

country. In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch physician, who afterward

rose to the highest eminence in his profession, having advocated the use

of anaesthetics in obstetrical cases, was immediately met by a storm

of opposition. This hostility flowed from an ancient and time-honoured

belief in Scotland. As far back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a

lady of rank, being charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for

the relief of pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was burned

alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old theological view

persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth century. From pulpit

after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was denounced as impious

and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited abundantly, the ordinary

declaration being that to use chloroform was "to avoid one part of

the primeval curse on woman." Simpson wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to

defend the blessing which he brought into use; but he seemed about to be

overcome, when he seized a new weapon, probably the most absurd by

which a great cause was ever won: "My opponents forget," he said, "the

twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the record of

the first surgical operation ever performed, and that text proves that

the Maker of the universe, before he took the rib from Adam's side for

the creation of Eve, caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam." This was

a stunning blow, but it did not entirely kill the opposition; they had

strength left to maintain that the "deep sleep of Adam took place before

the introduction of pain into the world--in a state of innocence."

But now a new champion intervened--Thomas Chalmers: with a few pungent

arguments from his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever, and the

greatest battle of science against suffering was won. This victory was

won not less for religion. Wisely did those who raised the monument

at Boston to one of the discoverers of anaesthetics inscribe upon its

pedestal the words from our sacred text, "This also cometh forth from

the Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and excellent in

working."(327)

(327) For the case of Eufame Macalyane, se Dalyell, Darker Superstitions

of Scotland, pp. 130, 133. For the contest of Simpson with Scotch

ecclesiatical authorities, see Duns, Life of Sir J. Y. Simpson, London,

1873, pp. 215-222, and 256-260.

XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE.

While this development of history was going on, the central idea on

which the whole theologic view rested--the idea of diseases as resulting

from the wrath of God or malice of Satan--was steadily weakened;

and, out of the many things which show this, one may be selected as

indicating the drift of thought among theologians themselves.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent divines of

the American branch of the Anglican Church framed their Book of Common

Prayer. Abounding as it does in evidences of their wisdom and piety, few

things are more noteworthy than a change made in the exhortation to the

faithful to present themselves at the communion. While, in the old form

laid down in the English Prayer Book, the minister was required to warn

his flock not "to kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us with

divers diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the American form all

this and more of similar import in various services was left out.

Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid indeed, and at

no period more so than during the last half of the nineteenth century.

The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the theological

hold upon medical education has been almost entirely relaxed. In three

great fields, especially, discoveries have been made which have done

much to disperse the atmosphere of miracle. First, there has come

knowledge regarding the relation between imagination and medicine,

which, though still defective, is of great importance. This relation has

been noted during the whole history of the science. When the soldiers

of the Prince of Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of

scurvy by scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials

filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave out

that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of such virtue

that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a gallon of water,

and that it had been obtained from the East with great difficulty and

danger." This statement, made with much solemnity, deeply impressed the

soldiers; they took the medicine eagerly, and great numbers recovered

rapidly. Again, two centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed

to apply the bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients

at Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for

disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application of the

thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by this application

alone, without any use of the gases whatever. Innumerable cases of this

sort have thrown a flood of light upon such cures as those wrought by

Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic tractors," and by a multitude of

other agencies temporarily in vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous

cures which in past ages have been so frequent and of which a few

survive.

The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last half-century

many scattered indications have been collected and supplemented by

thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and especially by Braid in

England and Charcot in France. Here, too, great inroads have been made

upon the province hitherto sacred to miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral

preacher, Steigenberger, of Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his

fears "lest accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"

denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the singular

argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly incapable of explaining

all the wonders of history, it is idle to consider it at all. But

investigations in hypnotism still go on, and may do much in the

twentieth century to carry the world yet further from the realm of the

miraculous.

In a third field science has won a striking series of victories.

Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of Leeuwenhoek in the

seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller in the eighteenth, and

developed or applied with wonderful skill by Ehrenberg, Cohn, Lister,

Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and their compeers in the nineteenth,

has explained the origin and proposed the prevention or cure of various

diseases widely prevailing, which until recently have been generally

held to be "inscrutable providences." Finally, the closer study of

psychology, especially in its relations to folklore, has revealed

processes involved in the development of myths and legends: the

phenomena of "expectant attention," the tendency to marvel-mongering,

and the feeling of "joy in believing."

In summing up the history of this long struggle between science and

theology, two main facts are to be noted: First, that in proportion as

the world approached the "ages of faith" it receded from ascertained

truth, and in proportion as the world has receded from the "ages

of faith" it has approached ascertained truth; secondly, that, in

proportion as the grasp of theology Upon education tightened, medicine

declined, and in proportion as that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been

developed.

The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical discoveries, yet

they have already taken from theology what was formerly its strongest

province--sweeping away from this vast field of human effort that belief

in miracles which for more than twenty centuries has been the main

stumbling-block in the path of medicine; and in doing this they have

cleared higher paths not only for science, but for religion.(328)

(328) For the rescue of medical education from the control of theology,

especially in France, see Rambaud, La Civilisation Contemporaine en

France, pp. 682, 683. For miraculous cures wrought by imagination,

see Tuke, Influence of Mind on Body, vol. ii. For opposition to the

scientific study of hypnotism, see Hypnotismus und Wunder: ein Vortrag,

mit Weiterungen, von Max Steigenberger, Domprediger, Augsburg, 1888,

reviewed in Science, Feb. 15, 1889, p. 127. For a recent statement

regarding the development of studies in hypnotism, see Liegeois, De

la Suggestion et du Somnambulisme dans leurs rapports avec la

Jurisprudence, Paris, 1889, chap. ii. As to joy in believing and

exaggerating marvels, see in the London Graphic for January 2, 1892,

an account of Hindu jugglers by "Professor" Hofmann, himself an expert

conjurer. He shows that the Hindu performances have been grossly and

persistently exaggerated in the accounts of travellers; that they are

easily seen through, and greatly inferior to the jugglers' tricks seen

every day in European capitals. The eminent Prof. De Gubernatis, who

also had witnessed the Hindu performances, assured the present writer

that the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated. As

to the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most

important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for perhaps

the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers Middleton, D.

D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have

subsisted in the Christian Church, London, 1749. For probably the most

judicially fair discussion, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol.

i, chap. iii; also his Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chaps. i and ii;

and for perhaps the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements,

see Max Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the

University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv. See also, for

very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's Literature

and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent utterance of great

clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address before the Johns Hopkins

University, given in Science for March 27, 1891.

CHAPTER XIV. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE.

I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION.

A very striking feature in recorded history has been the recurrence

of great pestilences. Various indications in ancient times show their

frequency, while the famous description of the plague of Athens given

by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by Lucretius, exemplify their

severity. In the Middle Ages they raged from time to time throughout

Europe: such plagues as the Black Death and the sweating sickness swept

off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of the former,

at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than half the population

of England died, and that twenty-five millions of people perished in

various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven thousand patients died of

the plague at Paris alone, and in 1580 more than twenty thousand. The

great plague in England and other parts of Europe in the seventeenth

century was also fearful, and that which swept the south of Europe in

the early part of the eighteenth century, as well as the invasions by

the cholera at various times during the nineteenth, while less

terrible than those of former years, have left a deep impress upon the

imaginations of men.

From the earliest records we find such pestilences attributed to the

wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had been the prevailing view even

in the most cultured ages before the establishment of Christianity: in

Greece and Rome especially, plagues of various sorts were attributed

to the wrath of the gods; in Judea, the scriptural records of various

plagues sent upon the earth by the Divine fiat as a punishment for sin

show the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples and

intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the epidemic which

carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the children of Israel,

and which was only stayed by the prayers and offerings of Aaron, the

high priest; the destruction of seventy thousand men in the pestilence

by which King David was punished for the numbering of Israel, and

which was only stopped when the wrath of Jahveh was averted by

burnt-offerings; the plague threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and

that delineated in the Apocalypse. From these sources this current of

ideas was poured into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been

that during nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity,

and down to a period within living memory, at the appearance of

any pestilence the Church authorities, instead of devising sanitary

measures, have very generally preached the necessity of immediate

atonement for offences against the Almighty.

This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new development

of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan and evil angels,

the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of antiquity were devils being

cited as its sufficient warrant.(329)

(329) For plague during the Peloponnesian war, see Thucydides, vol. ii,

pp.47-55, and vol. iii, p. 87. For a general statement regarding this

and other plagues in ancient times, see Lucretius, vol. vi, pp. 1090 et

seq.; and for a translation, see vol. i, p. 179, in Munro's edition

of 1886. For early views of sanitary science in Greece and Rome, see

Forster's Inquiry, in The Pamphleteer, vol. xxiv, p. 404. For the

Greek view of the interference of the gods in disease, especially in

pestilence, see Grote's History of Greece, vol. i, pp. 251, 485,

and vol. vi, p. 213; see also Herodotus, lib. iii, c. xxxviii, and

elsewhere. For the Hebrew view of the same interference by the Almighty,

see especially Numbers xi, 4-34; also xvi, 49; I Samuel xxiv; also Psalm

cvi, 29; also the well-known texts in Zechariah and Revelation. For St.

Paul's declaration that the gods of the heathen are devils, see I Cor.

x, 20. As to the earlier origin of the plague in Egypt, see Haeser,

'Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Medicin und der epidemischen Krankheiten,

Jena, 1875-'82, vol. iii, pp. 15 et seq.

Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were thought, upon

scriptural authority, to be "signs and wonders"--evidences of the

Divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations; and this belief, acting

powerfully upon the minds of millions, did much to create a panic-terror

sure to increase epidemic disease wherever it broke forth.

The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now known to have

been the want of hygienic precaution, both in the Eastern centres, where

various plagues were developed, and in the European towns through which

they spread. And here certain theological reasonings came in to resist

the evolution of a proper sanitary theory. Out of the Orient had been

poured into the thinking of western Europe the theological idea that the

abasement of man adds to the glory of God; that indignity to the body

may secure salvation to the soul; hence, that cleanliness betokens pride

and filthiness humility. Living in filth was regarded by great numbers

of holy men, who set an example to the Church and to society, as an

evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and the Breviary of the Roman Church

dwell with unction on the fact that St. Hilarion lived his whole life

long in utter physical uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St.

Anthony because he had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most

striking evidence of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither

his hands nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body

save her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the nuns

religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was eminent for

filthiness; St. Simnon Stylites was in this respect unspeakable--the

least that can be said is, that he lived in ordure and stench

intolerable to his visitors. The Lives of the Saints dwell with

complacency on the statement that, when sundry Eastern monks showed a

disposition to wash themselves, the Almighty manifested his displeasure

by drying up a neighbouring stream until the bath which it had supplied

was destroyed.

The religious world was far indeed from the inspired utterance

attributed to John Wesley, that "cleanliness is near akin to godliness."

For century after century the idea prevailed that filthiness was akin to

holiness; and, while we may well believe that the devotion of the clergy

to the sick was one cause why, during the greater plagues, they lost so

large a proportion of their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion

that their want of cleanliness had much to do with it. In France, during

the fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of

his time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered

especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy. During

the Black Death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks fell victims

in one group of buildings.

Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of thought

exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because

it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is

prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at

large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions

were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the

wrath of God or the malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and

powerful impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the

end of the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was

elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful pestilence:

the people were dying by thousands; out of one procession imploring the

mercy of Heaven no less than eighty persons died within an hour:

what the heathen in an earlier epoch had attributed to Apollo was now

attributed to Jehovah, and chroniclers tell us that fiery darts were

seen flung from heaven into the devoted city. But finally, in the midst

of all this horror, Gregory, at the head of a penitential procession,

saw hovering over the mausoleum of Hadrian the figure of the archangel

Michael, who was just sheathing a flaming sword, while three angels

were heard chanting the Regina Coeli. The legend continues that the Pope

immediately broke forth into hallelujahs for this sign that the plague

was stayed, and, as it shortly afterward became less severe, a chapel

was built at the summit of the mausoleum and dedicated to St. Michael;

still later, above the whole was erected the colossal statue of the

archangel sheathing his sword, which still stands to perpetuate the

legend. Thus the greatest of Rome's ancient funeral monuments was made

to bear testimony to this medieval belief; the mausoleum of Hadrian

became the castle of St. Angelo. A legend like this, claiming to

date from the greatest of the early popes, and vouched for by such an

imposing monument, had undoubtedly a marked effect upon the dominant

theology throughout Europe, which was constantly developing a great body

of thought regarding the agencies by which the Divine wrath might be

averted.

First among these agencies, naturally, were evidences of devotion,

especially gifts of land, money, or privileges to churches, monasteries,

and shrines--the seats of fetiches which it was supposed had wrought

cures or might work them. The whole evolution of modern history, not

only ecclesiastical but civil, has been largely affected by the wealth

transferred to the clergy at such periods. It was noted that in the

fourteenth century, after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed,

an immensely increased proportion of the landed and personal property of

every European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a great

ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of the ministers

of God."(330)

(330) For triumphant mention of St. Hilarion's filth, see the Roman

Breviary for October 21st; and for details, see S. Hieronymus, Vita S.

Hilarionis Eremitae, in Migne, Patrologia, vol. xxiii. For Athanasius's

reference to St. Anthony's filth, see works of St. Athanasius in the

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. iv, p. 209. For the

filthiness of the other saints named, see citations from the Lives of

the Saints, in Lecky's History of European Morals, vol. ii, pp. 117,

118. For Guy de Chauliac's observation on the filthiness of Carmelite

monks and their great losses by pestilence, see Meryon, History of

Medicine, vol. i, p. 257. For the mortality among the Carthusian monks

in time of plague, see Mrs. Lecky's very interesting Visit to the Grand

Chartreuse, in The Nineteenth Century for March, 1891. For the plague

at Rome in 590, the legend regarding the fiery darts, mentioned by Pope

Gregory himself, and that of the castle of St. Angelo, see Gregorovius,

Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, vol. ii, pp. 26-35; also Story,

Castle of St. Angelo, etc., chap. ii. For the remark that "pestilences

are the harvest of the ministers of God," see reference to Charlevoix,

in Southey, History of Brazil, vol. ii, p. 254, cited in Buckle, vol. i,

p. 130, note.

Other modes of propitiating the higher powers were penitential

processions, the parading of images of the Virgin or of saints through

plague-stricken towns, and fetiches innumerable. Very noted in the

thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were the processions of the

flagellants, trooping through various parts of Europe, scourging their

naked bodies, shrieking the penitential psalms, and often running from

wild excesses of devotion to the maddest orgies.

Sometimes, too, plagues were attributed to the wrath of lesser heavenly

powers. Just as, in former times, the fury of "far-darting Apollo" was

felt when his name was not respectfully treated by mortals, so, in 1680,

the Church authorities at Rome discovered that the plague then raging

resulted from the anger of St. Sebastian because no monument had been

erected to him. Such a monument was therefore placed in the Church of

St. Peter ad Vincula, and the plague ceased.

So much for the endeavour to avert the wrath of the heavenly powers.

On the other hand, theological reasoning no less subtle was used in

thwarting the malice of Satan. This idea, too, came from far. In the

sacred books of India and Persia, as well as in our own, we find the

same theory of disease, leading to similar means of cure. Perhaps

the most astounding among Christian survivals of this theory and its

resultant practices was seen during the plague at Rome in 1522. In that

year, at that centre of divine illumination, certain people, having

reasoned upon the matter, came to the conclusion that this great scourge

was the result of Satanic malice; and, in view of St. Paul's declaration

that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the ancient

gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to punish that city

for their dethronement, and that the great amphitheatre was the chosen

haunt of these demon gods, an ox decorated with garlands, after the

ancient heathen manner, was taken in procession to the Colosseum and

solemnly sacrificed. Even this proved vain, and the Church authorities

then ordered expiatory processions and ceremonies to propitiate the

Almighty, the Virgin, and the saints, who had been offended by this

temporary effort to bribe their enemies.

But this sort of theological reasoning developed an idea far more

disastrous, and this was that Satan, in causing pestilences, used as his

emissaries especially Jews and witches. The proof of this belief in

the case of the Jews was seen in the fact that they escaped with a

less percentage of disease than did the Christians in the great plague

periods. This was doubtless due in some measure to their remarkable

sanitary system, which had probably originated thousands of years

before in Egypt, and had been handed down through Jewish lawgivers and

statesmen. Certainly they observed more careful sanitary rules and

more constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among

Christians; but the public at large could not understand so simple a

cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted

from protection by Satan, and that this protection was repaid and the

pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As a

result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts of

Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and to stop the

plague by torturing and murdering the Jews. Throughout Europe during

great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of this devoted people.

In Bavaria, at the time of the Black Death, it is computed that twelve

thousand Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is

said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee remains

as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for poisoning the

wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon,

near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood, and

in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were burned. Everywhere in

continental Europe this mad persecution went on; but it is a pleasure

to say that one great churchman, Pope Clement VI, stood against this

popular unreason, and, so far as he could bring his influence to bear on

the maddened populace, exercised it in favour of mercy to these supposed

enemies of the Almighty.(331)

(331) For an early conception in India of the Divinity acting through

medicine, see The Bhagavadgita, translated by Telang, p. 82, in Max

Muller's Sacred Books of the East. For the necessity of religious

means of securing knowledge of medicine, see the Anugita, translated by

Telang, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, p. 388. For ancient

Persian ideas of sickness as sent by the spirit of evil and to be cured

by spells, but not excluding medicine and surgery, and for sickness

generally as caused by the evil principle in demons, see the

Zend-Avesta, Darmesteter's translation, introduction, passim, but

especially p. xciii. For diseases wrought by witchcraft, see the same,

pp. 230, 293. On the preferences of spells in healing over medicine and

surgery, see Zend-Avesta, vol. i, pp. 85, 86. For healing by magic in

ancient Greece, see, e. g., the cure of Ulysses in the Odyssey, "They

stopped the black blood by a spell" (Odyssey, xxix, 457). For medicine

in Egypt as partly priestly and partly in the hands of physicians, see

Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, p. 136, note. For ideas of curing of

disease by expulsion of demons still surviving among various tribes

and nations of Asia, see J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: a Study of

Comparative Religion, London, 1890, pp. 184-192. For the Flagellants and

their processions at the time of the Black Death, see Lea, History

of the Inquisition, New York, 1888, vol. ii, pp. 381 et seq. For the

persecution of the Jews in time of pestilence, see ibid., p. 379 and

following, with authorities in the notes. For the expulsion of the Jews

from Padua, see the Acta Sanctorum, September, tom. viii, p. 893.

Yet, as late as 1527, the people of Pavia, being threatened with plague,

appealed to St. Bernardino of Feltro, who during his life had been a

fierce enemy of the Jews, and they passed a decree promising that if

the saint would avert the pestilence they would expel the Jews from the

city. The saint apparently accepted the bargain, and in due time the

Jews were expelled.

As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of pestilence

also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured mainly from

Oriental sources into our sacred books and thence into the early Church,

and was strengthened by a whole line of Church authorities, fathers,

doctors, and saints; but, above all, by the great bull, Summis

Desiderantes, issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from

the seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that

witches are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which

afflict humanity; and the Scripture on which the action recommended

against witches in this papal bull, as well as in so many sermons and

treatises for centuries afterward, was based, was the famous text, "Thou

shalt not suffer a witch to live." This idea persisted long, and the

evolution of it is among the most fearful things in human history.(332)

(332) On the plagues generally, see Hecker, Epidemics of the Middle

Ages, passim; but especially Haeser, as above, III. Band, pp. 1-202;

also Sprengel, Baas, Isensee, et al. For brief statement showing

the enormous loss of life in these plagues, see Littre, Medecine et

Medecins, Paris, 1875, pp. 3 et seq. For a summary of the effects of

the Black Plague throughout England, see Green's Short History of the

English People, chap. v. For the mortality in the Paris hospitals,

see Desmazes, Supplices, Prisons et Graces en France, Paris 1866. For

striking descriptions of plague-stricken cities, see the well-known

passages in Thucydides, Boccaccio, De Foe, and, above all, Manzoni's

Promessi Sposi. For examples of averting the plagues by processions, see

Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Condition de la Classe Agricole, etc., en

Normandie au Moyen Age, p. 630; also Fort, chap. xxiii. For the anger of

St. Sebastian as a cause of the plague at Rome, and its cessation when

a monument had been erected to him, see Paulus Diaconus, cited in

Gregorovius, vol. ii. p. 165. For the sacrifice of an ox in the

Colosseum to the ancient gods as a means of averting the plague of 1522,

at Rome, see Gregorovius, vol. viii, p. 390. As to massacres of the

Jews in order to avert the wrath of God in pestilence, see L'Ecole et la

Science, Paris, 1887, p. 178; also Hecker, and especially Hoeniger, Gang

und Verbreitung des Schwarzen Todes in Deutschalnd, Berlin, 1889. For

a long list of towns in which burnings of Jews took place for this

imaginary cause, see pp. 7-11. As to absolute want of sanitary

precautions, see Hecker, p. 292. As to condemnation by strong

religionists of medical means in the plague, see Fort, p. 130. For a

detailed account of the action of Popes Eugene IV, Innocent VIII, and

other popes, against witchcraft, ascribing to it storms and diseases,

and for the bull Summis Desiderantes, see the chapters on Meteorology

and Magic in this series. The text of the bull is given in the Malleus

Maleficarum, in Binsfield, and in Roskoff, Geschichte des Teufels,

Leipzig, 1869, vol. i, pp. 222-225, and a good summary and analysis of

it in Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprocesse. For a concise and admirable

statement of the contents and effects of the bull, see Lea, History of

the Inquisition, vol. iii, pp. 40 et seq.; and for the best statement

known to me of the general subject, Prof. George L. Burr's paper on

The Literature of Witchcraft, read before the American Historical

Association at Washington, 1890.

In Germany its development was especially terrible. From the middle of

the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Catholic

and Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics vied with each other in

detecting witches guilty of producing sickness or bad weather; women

were sent to torture and death by thousands, and with them, from time to

time, men and children. On the Catholic side sufficient warrant for

this work was found in the bull of Pope Innocent VIII, and the bishops'

palaces of south Germany became shambles,--the lordly prelates of

Salzburg, Wurzburg, and Bamberg taking the lead in this butchery.

In north Germany Protestantism was just as conscientiously cruel. It

based its theory and practice toward witches directly upon the Bible,

and above all on the great text which has cost the lives of so many

myriads of innocent men, women, and children, "Thou shalt not suffer a

witch to live." Naturally the Protestant authorities strove to show that

Protestantism was no less orthodox in this respect than Catholicism; and

such theological jurists as Carpzov, Damhouder, and Calov did their work

thoroughly. An eminent authority on this subject estimates the number of

victims thus sacrificed during that century in Germany alone at over a

hundred thousand.

Among the methods of this witch activity especially credited in central

and southern Europe was the anointing of city walls and pavements with

a diabolical unguent causing pestilence. In 1530 Michael Caddo was

executed with fearful tortures for thus besmearing the pavements of

Geneva. But far more dreadful was the torturing to death of a large body

of people at Milan, in the following century, for producing the plague

by anointing the walls; and a little later similar punishments for the

same crime were administered in Toulouse and other cities. The case in

Milan may be briefly summarized as showing the ideas on sanitary science

of all classes, from highest to lowest, in the seventeenth century. That

city was then under the control of Spain; and, its authorities having

received notice from the Spanish Government that certain persons

suspected of witchcraft had recently left Madrid, and had perhaps gone

to Milan to anoint the walls, this communication was dwelt upon in the

pulpits as another evidence of that Satanic malice which the Church

alone had the means of resisting, and the people were thus excited and

put upon the alert. One morning, in the year 1630, an old woman, looking

out of her window, saw a man walking along the street and wiping his

fingers upon the walls; she immediately called the attention of another

old woman, and they agreed that this man must be one of the diabolical

anointers. It was perfectly evident to a person under ordinary

conditions that this unfortunate man was simply trying to remove from

his fingers the ink gathered while writing from the ink-horn which he

carried in his girdle; but this explanation was too simple to satisfy

those who first observed him or those who afterward tried him: a mob was

raised and he was thrown into prison. Being tortured, he at first did

not know what to confess; but, on inquiring from the jailer and others,

he learned what the charge was, and, on being again subjected to torture

utterly beyond endurance, he confessed everything which was suggested

to him; and, on being tortured again and again to give the names of his

accomplices, he accused, at hazard, the first people in the city whom

he thought of. These, being arrested and tortured beyond endurance,

confessed and implicated a still greater number, until members of the

foremost families were included in the charge. Again and again all these

unfortunates were tortured beyond endurance. Under paganism, the rule

regarding torture had been that it should not be carried beyond human

endurance; and we therefore find Cicero ridiculing it as a means of

detecting crime, because a stalwart criminal of strong nerves might

resist it and go free, while a physically delicate man, though innocent,

would be forced to confess. Hence it was that under paganism a limit

was imposed to the torture which could be administered; but, when

Christianity had become predominant throughout Europe, torture was

developed with a cruelty never before known. There had been evolved a

doctrine of "excepted cases"--these "excepted cases" being especially

heresy and witchcraft; for by a very simple and logical process of

theological reasoning it was held that Satan would give supernatural

strength to his special devotees--that is, to heretics and witches--and

therefore that, in dealing with them, there should be no limit to the

torture. The result was in this particular case, as in tens of thousands

besides, that the accused confessed everything which could be suggested

to them, and often in the delirium of their agony confessed far more

than all that the zeal of the prosecutors could suggest. Finally, a

great number of worthy people were sentenced to the most cruel death

which could be invented. The records of their trials and deaths are

frightful. The treatise which in recent years has first brought to

light in connected form an authentic account of the proceedings in this

affair, and which gives at the end engravings of the accused subjected

to horrible tortures on their way to the stake and at the place of

execution itself, is one of the most fearful monuments of theological

reasoning and human folly.

To cap the climax, after a poor apothecary had been tortured into a

confession that he had made the magic ointment, and when he had been put

to death with the most exquisite refinements of torture, his family were

obliged to take another name, and were driven out from the city; his

house was torn down, and on its site was erected "The Column of Infamy,"

which remained on this spot until, toward the end of the eighteenth

century, a party of young radicals, probably influenced by the reading

of Beccaria, sallied forth one night and leveled this pious monument to

the ground.

Herein was seen the culmination and decline of the bull Summis

Desiderantes. It had been issued by him whom a majority of the Christian

world believes to be infallible in his teachings to the Church as

regards faith and morals; yet here was a deliberate utterance in a

matter of faith and morals which even children now know to be utterly

untrue. Though Beccaria's book on Crimes and Punishments, with its

declarations against torture, was placed by the Church authorities upon

the Index, and though the faithful throughout the Christian world were

forbidden to read it, even this could not prevent the victory of truth

over this infallible utterance of Innocent VIII.(333)

(333) As to the fearful effects of the papal bull Summis Desiderantes in

south Germany, as to the Protestant severities in north Germany, as to

the immense number of women and children put to death for witchcraft

in Germany generally for spreading storms and pestilence, and as to the

monstrous doctrine of "excepted cases," see the standard authorities on

witchcraft, especially Wachter, Beitrage zur Geschichte des Strafrechts,

Soldan, Horst, Hauber, and Langin; also Burr, as above. In another

series of chapters on The Warfare of Humanity with Theology, I hope to

go more fully into the subject. For the magic spreading of the plague at

Milan, see Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi and La Colonna Infame; and for

the origin of the charges, with all the details of the trail, see the

Precesso Originale degli Untori, Milan, 1839, passim, but especially

the large folding plate at the end, exhibiting the tortures. For the

after-history of the Column of Infamy, and for the placing of Beccaria's

book on the Index, see Cantu, Vita di Beccaria. For the magic spreading

of the plague in general, see Littre, pp. 492 and following.

As the seventeenth century went on, ingenuity in all parts of Europe

seemed devoted to new developments of fetichism. A very curious monument

of this evolution in Italy exists in the Royal Gallery of Paintings at

Naples, where may be seen several pictures representing the measures

taken to save the city from the plague during the seventeenth century,

but especially from the plague of 1656. One enormous canvas gives a

curious example of the theological doctrine of intercession between man

and his Maker, spun out to its logical length. In the background is the

plague-stricken city: in the foreground the people are praying to the

city authorities to avert the plague; the city authorities are praying

to the Carthusian monks; the monks are praying to St. Martin, St. Bruno,

and St. Januarius; these three saints in their turn are praying to the

Virgin; the Virgin prays to Christ; and Christ prays to the Almighty.

Still another picture represents the people, led by the priests,

executing with horrible tortures the Jews, heretics, and witches who

were supposed to cause the pestilence of 1656, while in the heavens

the Virgin and St. Januarius are interceding with Christ to sheathe his

sword and stop the plague.

In such an atmosphere of thought it is no wonder that the death

statistics were appalling. We hear of districts in which not more than

one in ten escaped, and some were entirely depopulated.

Such appeals to fetich against pestilence have continued in Naples down

to our own time, the great saving power being the liquefaction of the

blood of St. Januarius. In 1856 the present writer saw this miracle

performed in the gorgeous chapel of the saint forming part of the

Cathedral of Naples. The chapel was filled with devout worshippers of

every class, from the officials in court dress, representing the Bourbon

king, down to the lowest lazzaroni. The reliquary of silver-gilt, shaped

like a large human head, and supposed to contain the skull of the saint,

was first placed upon the altar; next, two vials containing a dark

substance said to be his blood, having been taken from the wall, were

also placed upon the altar near the head. As the priests said masses,

they turned the vials from time to time, and the liquefaction being

somewhat delayed, the great crowd of people burst out into more and more

impassioned expostulation and petitions to the saint. Just in front

of the altar were the lazzaroni who claimed to be descendants of the

saint's family, and these were especially importunate: at such times

they beg, they scold, they even threaten; they have been known to abuse

the saint roundly, and to tell him that, if he did not care to show his

favour to the city by liquefying his blood, St. Cosmo and St. Damian

were just as good saints as he, and would no doubt be very glad to have

the city devote itself to them. At last, on the occasion above referred

to, the priest, turning the vials suddenly, announced that the saint had

performed the miracle, and instantly priests, people, choir, and organ

burst forth into a great Te Deum; bells rang, and cannon roared; a

procession was formed, and the shrine containing the saint's relics was

carried through the streets, the people prostrating themselves on both

sides of the way and throwing showers of rose leaves upon the shrine

and upon the path before it. The contents of these precious vials are an

interesting relic indeed, for they represent to us vividly that period

when men who were willing to go to the stake for their religious

opinions thought it not wrong to save the souls of their fellowmen

by pious mendacity and consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this

miracle is very simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those

mixtures fusing at low temperature, which, while kept in its place

within the cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being

brought out into the hot, crowded chapel, and fondled by the warm hands

of the priests, gradually softens and becomes liquid. It was curious

to note, at the time above mentioned, that even the high functionaries

representing the king looked at the miracle with awe: they evidently

found "joy in believing," and one of them assured the present writer

that the only thing which COULD cause it was the direct exercise of

miraculous power.

It may be reassuring to persons contemplating a visit to that beautiful

capital in these days, that, while this miracle still goes on, it is

no longer the only thing relied upon to preserve the public health. An

unbelieving generation, especially taught by the recent horrors of the

cholera, has thought it wise to supplement the power of St. Januarius by

the "Risanamento," begun mainly in 1885 and still going on. The drainage

of the city has thus been greatly improved, the old wells closed, and

pure water introduced from the mountains. Moreover, at the last outburst

of cholera a few years since, a noble deed was done which by its moral

effect exercised a widespread healing power. Upon hearing of this

terrific outbreak of pestilence, King Humbert, though under the ban of

the Church, broke from all the entreaties of his friends and family,

went directly into the plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets,

public places, and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the sick

and dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the pestilence.

To the credit of the Church it should also be said that the Cardinal

Archbishop San Felice joined him in this.

Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king seems to have

surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for it gave confidence

and courage which very soon showed their effects in diminishing the

number of deaths. It would certainly appear that in this matter the king

was more directly under Divine inspiration and guidance than was the

Pope; for the fact that King Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his

life, while Leo XIII remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed

the Italian people in favour of the new regime and against the old as

nothing else could have done.

In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the new Italian

government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially Rome, which under the

sway of the popes was scandalously filthy, are now among the cleanest

cities in Europe. What the relics of St. Januarius, St. Anthony, and

a multitude of local fetiches throughout Italy were for ages utterly

unable to do, has been accomplished by the development of the simplest

sanitary principles.

Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where theological

considerations have been all-controlling for centuries. Down to the

interference of Napoleon with that kingdom, all sanitary efforts

were looked upon as absurd if not impious. The most sober accounts of

travellers in the Spanish Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes

irresistibly comic in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining

arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in an

American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop pestilence

by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local

Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has begun to work for

good. The outbreaks of cholera in recent years have done some little to

bring in better sanitary measures.(334)

(334) As to the recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague, and

the pictures showing the intercession of Januarius and other saints, I

have relied on my own notes made at various visits to Naples. For the

general subject, see Peter, Etudes Napolitaines, especially chapters

v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's

blood by eye-witnesses, one an eminent Catholic of the seventeenth

century, and the other a distinguished Protestant of our own time,

see Murray's Handbook for South Italy and Naples, description of the

Cathedral of San Gennaro. For an interesting series of articles on the

subject, see The Catholic World for September, October, and November,

1871. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of Spain, and

the resistance of the people, down to a recent period, to the most

ordinary regulations prompted by decency, see Bascome, History of

the Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119, 120. See also the

Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 446; also, for

various citations, the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization

in England.

II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.

We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient to

theology were the forces working in opposition to the evolution of

hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition, less effective, it is

true, but still acting with great power, in countries which had become

somewhat emancipated from theological control. In England, during the

medieval period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally resorted to, and

here and there we hear of persecutions of witches; but, as torture was

rarely used in England, there were, from those charged with producing

plague, few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries

gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in England was

such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting organic material was

allowed to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural

dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In

his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes

the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what

is of far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the

wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a chamber

which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately seized with a

fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the sweating sickness to this

cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius advised sanitary precautions against

the plague, and in after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged

them; but the prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done.

Even the floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich

Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one of the

chroniclers tells us.

In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was mainly

sought in special church services. The foremost English churchmen during

that century being greatly given to study of the early fathers of the

Church; the theological theory of disease, so dear to the fathers, still

held sway, and this was the case when the various visitations reached

their climax in the great plague of London in 1665, which swept off more

than a hundred thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting

it by sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of

the time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from

medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally attributed to

the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the Sabbath." Texts from

Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the Apocalypse were dwelt upon in

the pulpits to show that plagues are sent by the Almighty to punish

sin; and perhaps the most ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes

described by De Foe is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the

streets with a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner

of Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its destruction in

forty days.

That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary sin. Both

before and after this culmination of the disease cases of plague were

constantly occurring in London throughout the seventeenth century; but

about the beginning of the eighteenth century it began to disappear. The

great fire had done a good work by sweeping off many causes and centres

of infection, and there had come wider streets, better pavements, and

improved water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague,

other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged in the

city, became much less frequent.

But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London, others developed

by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there and elsewhere, and of

these perhaps the most fearful was the jail fever. The prisons of that

period were vile beyond belief. Men were confined in dungeons rarely if

ever disinfected after the death of previous occupants, and on corridors

connecting directly with the foulest sewers: there was no proper

disinfection, ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large

prisons for criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from

these centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This was

especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In

the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief baron, the sheriff, and

about three hundred men died within forty hours. Lord Bacon declared the

jail fever "the most pernicious infection next to the plague." In 1730,

at the Dorsetshire Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed

by it. The High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A

single Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost no less

than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at Newgate, in the

heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor, sundry aldermen, and

many others, died of it.

It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing with this

state of things were few, the theological spirit developed a new and

special form of prayer for the sufferers and placed it in the Irish

Prayer Book.

These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance through the

first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750 began the work

of John Howard, who visited the prisons of England, made known their

condition to the world, and never rested until they were greatly

improved. Then he applied the same benevolent activity to prisons in

other countries, in the far East, and in southern Europe, and finally

laid down his life, a victim to disease contracted on one of his

missions of mercy; but the hygienic reforms he began were developed

more and more until this fearful blot upon modern civilization was

removed.(335)

(335) For Erasmus, see the letter cited in Bascome, History of Epidemic

Pestilences, London, 1851. For the account of the condition of Queen

Elizabeth's presence chamber, see the same, p. 206; see also the same

for attempts at sanitation by Caius, Mead, Pringle, and others; also

see Baas and various medical authorities. For the plague in London, see

Green's History of the English People, chap. ix, sec. 2; and for a more

detailed account, see Lingard, History of England, enlarged edition of

1849, vol. ix, pp. 107 et seq. For full scientific discussion of this

and other plagues from a medical point of view, see Creighton, History

of Epidemics in Great Britain, vol. ii, chap. i. For the London plague

as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking, see A Divine Tragedie lately

acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of God's judgements

upon Sabbath Breakers and other like libertines, etc., by the worthy

divine, Mr. Henry Burton, 1641. The book gives fifty-six accounts of

Sabbath-breakers sorely punished, generally struck dead, in England,

with places, names, and dates. For a general account of the condition of

London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the diminution of

the plague by the rebuilding of some parts of the city after the great

fire, see Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. i,

pp. 592, 593. For the jail fever, see Lecky, vol. i, pp. 500-503.

The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of America; but

here, while plagues were steadily attributed to Divine wrath or

Satanic malice, there was one case in which it was claimed that such

a visitation was due to the Divine mercy. The pestilence among the

INDIANS, before the arrival of the Plymouth Colony, was attributed in

a notable work of that period to the Divine purpose of clearing New

England for the heralds of the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues

which destroyed the WHITE population were attributed by the same

authority to devils and witches. In Cotton Mather's Wonder of the

Invisible World, published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples

of this. The great Puritan divine tells us:

"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil troubles us. It

is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10. THEY WERE DESTROYED OF THE

DESTROYER. That is, they had the Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer,

or the Divil, that scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and

Contagious Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with

them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air

about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of

our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation and

Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes within us;

Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjunction of Nitre and Vitriol,

Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the Divel has raised those

Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous. Quivers full of Terrible Arrows,

how easily can he shoot the deleterious Miasms into those Juices or

Bowels of Men's Bodies, which will soon Enflame them with a Mortal Fire!

Hence come such Plagues, as that Beesome of Destruction which within our

memory swept away such a throng of people from one English City in one

Visitation: and hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so many

Disguised Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations."

Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases, and speaks

of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of Infirmity" being

"Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the Witches," of which he gives

an instance. He also cites a case where a patient "was brought unto

death's door and so remained until the witch was taken and carried

away by the constable, when he began at once to recover and was soon

well."(336)

(336) For the passages from Cotton Mather, see his book as cited, pp.

17, 18, also 134, 145. Johnson declares that "by this meanes Christ...

not only made roome for His people to plant, but also tamed the hard

and cruell hearts of these barbarous Indians, insomuch that a halfe a

handful of His people landing not long after in Plymouth Plantation,

found little resistance." See The History of New England, by Edward

Johnson, London, 1654. Reprinted in the Massachusetts Historical

Society's Collection, second series, vol. i, p. 67.

In France we see, during generation after generation, a similar history

evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and was met by various

fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at Marseilles near the beginning of

the last century. The chronicles of its sway are ghastly. They speak

of great heaps of the unburied dead in the public places, "forming

pestilential volcanoes"; of plague-stricken men and women in delirium

wandering naked through the streets; of churches and shrines thronged

with great crowds shrieking for mercy; of other crowds flinging

themselves into the wildest debauchery; of robber bands assassinating

the dying and plundering the dead; of three thousand neglected children

collected in one hospital and then left to die; and of the death-roll

numbering at last fifty thousand out of a population of less than ninety

thousand.

In the midst of these fearful scenes stood a body of men and women

worthy to be held in eternal honour--the physicians from Paris and

Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of his associates;

but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop Belzunce. The history of

these men may well make us glory in human nature; but in all this noble

group the figure of Belzunce is the most striking. Nobly and firmly,

when so many others even among the regular and secular ecclesiastics

fled, he stood by his flock: day and night he was at work in the

hospitals, cheering the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was

possible for the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the

two great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a

theologian he organized processions and expiatory services, which, it

must be confessed, rather increased the disease than diminished it;

moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a hysterical nun--the worship

of the material, physical sacred heart of Jesus--and was one of the

first to consecrate his diocese to it; but, on the other hand, the

religious spirit gave in him one of its most beautiful manifestations in

that or any other century; justly have the people of Marseilles placed

his statue in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and

blessing.

In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent period, we find

pestilences resulting from carelessness or superstition still called

"inscrutable providences." As late as the end of the eighteenth century,

when great epidemics made fearful havoc in Austria, the main means

against them seem to have been grovelling before the image of St.

Sebastian and calling in special "witch-doctors"--that is, monks who

cast out devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood

of these monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and the

enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods was only diminished in the

present century, when scientific hygiene began to make its way.

The old view of pestilence had also its full course in Calvinistic

Scotland; the only difference being that, while in Roman Catholic

countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts, processions, exorcisms,

burnings of witches, and other works of expiation, promoted by priests;

in Scotland, after the Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and

executions of witches promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the

filthiness of Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within

this century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into the

sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or thrown into

the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain is the help of man,"

checked scientific thought and paralyzed sanitary endeavour. The result

was natural: between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty

notable epidemics swept the country, and some of them carried off

multitudes; but as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement;

they were called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human

sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the particular

sin concerned and to declaim against it. Amazing theories were thus

propounded--theories which led to spasms of severity; and, in some of

these, offences generally punished much less severely were visited with

death. Every pulpit interpreted the ways of God to man in such seasons

so as rather to increase than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of

thus seeking supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such

facts as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole population of

the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth century, other towns

suffering similarly both then and afterward.

Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavoured to push

sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to clean the streets

of Edinburgh; but the chroniclers tell us that "the magistrates and

ministers gave no heed." One sort of calamity, indeed, came in as a

mercy--the great fires which swept through the cities, clearing and

cleaning them. Though the town council of Edinburgh declared the noted

fire of 1700 "a fearful rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it

had done its work, disease and death were greatly diminished.(337)

(337) For the plague at Marseilles and its depopulation, see Henri

Martin, Histoire de France, vol. xv, especially document cited in

appendix; also Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xliii; also Rambaud. For

the resort to witch doctors in Austria against pestilence, down to

the end of the eighteenth century, see Biedermann, Deutschland im

Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. For the resort to St. Sebastian, see the

widespread editions of the Vita et Gesta Sancti Sebastiani, contra

pestem patroni, prefaced with commendations from bishops and other high

ecclesiastics. The edition in the Cornell University Library is that of

Augsburg, 1693. For the reign of filth and pestilence in Scotland, see

Charles Rogers, D. D., Social Life in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1884, vol. i,

pp. 305-316; see also Buckle's second volume.

III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE.

But by those standing in the higher places of thought some glimpses of

scientific truth had already been obtained, and attempts at compromise

between theology and science in this field began to be made, not only by

ecclesiastics, but first of all, as far back as the seventeenth century,

by a man of science eminent both for attainments and character--Robert

Boyle. Inspired by the discoveries in other fields, which had swept away

so much of theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction

that some epidemics are due--in his own words--"to a tragical concourse

of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these may be the result

of Divine interpositions provoked by human sins. As time went on,

great difficulties showed themselves in the way of this

compromise--difficulties theological not less than difficulties

scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more hard to explain the

theological grounds why so many orthodox cities, firm in the faith,

were punished, and so many heretical cities spared; and why, in regions

devoted to the Church, the poorer people, whose faith in theological

fetiches was unquestioning, died in times of pestilence like flies,

while sceptics so frequently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort

beset devoted Protestants; they, too, might well ask why it was that the

devout peasantry in their humble cottages perished, while so much

larger a proportion of the more sceptical upper classes were untouched.

Gradually it dawned both upon Catholic and Protestant countries that, if

any sin be punished by pestilence, it is the sin of filthiness; more and

more it began to be seen by thinking men of both religions that

Wesley's great dictum stated even less than the truth; that not only

was "cleanliness akin to godliness," but that, as a means of keeping

off pestilence, it was far superior to godliness as godliness was then

generally understood.(338)

(338) For Boyle's attempt at compromise, see Discourse on the Air, in

his works, vol. iv, pp. 288, 289, cited by Buckle, vol. i, pp. 128, 129,

note.

The recent history of sanitation in all civilized countries shows

triumphs which might well fill us with wonder, did there not rise within

us a far greater wonder that they were so long delayed. Amazing is it to

see how near the world has come again and again to discovering the key

to the cause and cure of pestilence. It is now a matter of the simplest

elementary knowledge that some of the worst epidemics are conveyed in

water. But this fact seems to have been discovered many times in human

history. In the Peloponnesian war the Athenians asserted that their

enemies had poisoned their cisterns; in the Middle Ages the people

generally declared that the Jews had poisoned their wells; and as late

as the cholera of 1832 the Parisian mob insisted that the water-carriers

who distributed water for drinking purposes from the Seine, polluted as

it was by sewage, had poisoned it, and in some cases murdered them

on this charge: so far did this feeling go that locked covers were

sometimes placed upon the water-buckets. Had not such men as Roger

Bacon and his long line of successors been thwarted by theological

authority,--had not such men as Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and

Albert the Great been drawn or driven from the paths of science into the

dark, tortuous paths of theology, leading no whither,--the world to-day,

at the end of the nineteenth century, would have arrived at the solution

of great problems and the enjoyment of great results which will only

be reached at the end of the twentieth century, and even in generations

more remote. Diseases like typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary

consumption, scarlet fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and la grippe, which

now carry off so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased

to scourge the world.

Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law governing the

relation of theology to disease is now well before the world, and it is

seen in the fact that, just in proportion as the world progressed from

the sway of Hippocrates to that of the ages of faith, so it progressed

in the frequency and severity of great pestilences; and that, on the

other hand, just in proportion as the world has receded from that period

when theology was all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after plague

has disappeared, and those remaining have become less and less frequent

and virulent.(339)

(339) For the charge of poisoning water and producing pestilence among

the Greeks, see Grote, History of Greece, vol. vi, p. 213. For a similar

charge against the Jews in the Middle Ages, see various histories

already cited; and for the great popular prejudice against

water-carriers at Paris in recent times, see the larger recent French

histories.