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. Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to employ them. The Councils of Béziers and Alby in the thirteenth century, the Council of Avignon in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful to call Jewish physicians or surgeons, under penalty of excommunication: such great preachers as John Geyler 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 Würtemberg, 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.[1].
Nor did the Reformation immediately change the sacred theory of medicine. Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed his own disease 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
- ↑ For the general subject of the influence of theological ideas upon medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, New York, 1883, chapters xiii and xviii; also Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Raimbaud, Histoire de la Civilisation en France, Paris, 1885, vol. i, chap, xviii; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 345, and elsewhere; also Baas and others. For the eminence of Jewish physicians, and proscription of them, see Beugnot, Les Juifs d'Occident, Paris, 1824, pp. 76-94; also Bédarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, et en Espagne, chapters v, viii, x, and xiii; also Rénouard, Histoire de la Médecine, Paris, 1846, tome i, p. 439; also, especially, Lammert, Volksmedizin, etc., in Bayern, p. 6, note. For denunciations of them by Geyler 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 de 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
