Jewish physicians prohibited
The bitter hatred of the papacy toward independence of mind is well illustrated in the treatment that the Jewish physicians received from the popes. Draper says: “The school at Salerno was still sending forth its doctors. In Rome, Jewish physicians were numerous, the popes themselves employing them.... At this period Spain and France were full of learned Jews; and perhaps partly by their exerting too much influence upon the higher classes with whom they came in contact (for the physician of a Christian prince was very often the rival of his confessor), and partly because the practice of medicine, as they pursued it, interfered with the gains of the church, the clergy took alarm, and caused to be re-enacted or enforced the ancient laws. The Council of Beziers (A.D. 1246) and the Council of Alby (A.D. 1254) prohibited all Christians from resorting to the services of an Israelitish physician.”[95]
Hatred of physicians
To show that this was a matter which concerned the schools, and in proof of the statement that papal schools still adhere to formalism, miracle cure, and relic worship, we need only to notice that “the faculty of Paris [University], awakening at last to the danger of the case, caused, A.D. 1301, a decree to be published prohibiting either man or woman of the religion of Moses from practicing medicine upon any person of the Catholic religion. A similar course was pursued in Spain. At this time the Jews were confessedly at the head of French medicine. It was the appointment of one of their persuasion, Profatius, as regent of the faculty of Montpellier, A.D. 1300, which drew upon them the wrath of the faculty of Paris.”
Jews banished
“The animosity of the French ecclesiastics against the Jewish physicians at last led to the banishment of all the Jews from France, A.D. 1306.”[96] The papal universities were unwilling to teach medicine, and finding that the Jewish schools of science were greatly weakening papal authority in France, this race was banished bodily.
Position of physiology
Comparing this history with the present work of the medical fraternity, and especially with that class of medical students whose life work is to spread the gospel while relieving the body, one better understands that physiology should be the basis of every educational effort, and the place that it and kindred sciences should occupy in the courses of instruction pursued by our children, youth, and maturer minds; and also the cause of that spiritual darkness which is even now hanging over the world, and for centuries held Europe in its clutches; but it shall be pierced by Christian education.
Papal method of meeting opposition