However, it was not necessary for the priests, under some circumstances, personally to take the trouble of manufacturing miraculous medicines from relics. There existed some holy graves which were so accommodating that they furnished, of their own accord, the holy material that was required for the treatment of the sick. Thus the chronicler records that the grave of the evangelist John exuded a sort of white manna, which, owing to its wonder-working curative power, was distributed all over the world. A similar product was yielded by the grave of the Apostle Andrew on the festival day of that saint. A precious oil scented like nectar also sprang from the resting-place of this man of God.
We see, therefore, that the sacred pharmacopœia teemed with remedies, and that they were quite extensively employed is shown sufficiently by the history of the saints and, above all, by the works of Gregory of Tours. The latter, in particular, offer an actually inexhaustible mine of information concerning the medical activity of Christian saints.
It does not, however, appear that this medical activity enjoyed the confidence of priests or of laymen to such an extent that the services of a professional physician were entirely discarded. It is true, Gregory of Tours expresses himself in reference to the terrestrial physicians in a manner which is by no means complimentary, for he says:
“What are they (the physicians) able to accomplish with their instruments? Their office is rather to cause pain than to alleviate it; if they open the eye and cut into it with pointed lancets, they surely cause the agony of death to come in sight before assisting in the recovery of vision, and if all precautionary measures are not thoroughly carried out the power of sight is lost forever. Our beloved saint, however, has only one instrument of steel, and that is his will, and only one salve, and that is his curative power.”
But in spite of this want of confidence in physicians, Gregory of Tours did not hesitate eventually to interfere quite extensively with the practise of the saints by the employment of ordinary medicine.
At least, he frequently did so when he felt sick himself. Thus, one day, when he was afflicted with severe bellyache, he employed warm poultices and baths, and only when the refractory abdomen gave him no rest, after a continuance of this treatment for six days, did Gregory apply to St. Martin. When, at another time, Gregory was affected with so severe an attack that his death was believed to be imminent, he caused himself at first to be treated according to all the rules of medical science, and not until improvement failed to appear, did he think of the aid of the saints. Then he spoke to his physician as follows: “Well, you have exhausted all remedies of your art, you have used up all your powers and juices, but the remedies of this world do not help him who is destined to die. Only one thing remains for me to do. I shall tell you the great remedy: take some stone powder from the grave of St. Martin and prepare it for me.”
The healing of the sick by the power of the saints and through relics was in favor throughout the middle ages, and even in the sixteenth century it was so generally in vogue that a physician by the name of Wyer (1515 to 1588) considered it expedient to demonstrate the incredibility of such heavenly interference.
It is by no means my intention to hold solely dogmatic Christendom of the middle ages and the Christian priest responsible for the monstrous superstition into which, according to the above description, Christian religion had degenerated in the domain of medicine. This superstition resulted from the cooperation of quite incongruous factors; but we can by no means exempt the Christian priest entirely from blame, in that he assisted very materially in furthering it. For we must bear in mind that the Christian cloister of the middle ages was not only the last refuge of humanistic culture, but the science of medicine found an asylum of preeminent importance within its precincts. Medicine had taken refuge in the cloister from the storms and tribulations which followed the political collapse of antiquity and from the excitement of national migrations, and had here attained a high degree of perfection. In fact, we may contend, without exaggeration, that at certain periods of the middle ages the Christian monastery had the importance as a medical school which was later on claimed by the university; for the Christian monks not only nursed the sick and practised medicine, but also took an interest in its scientific development. They were well acquainted with the medical classics of ancient times, such as Hippocrates, Herophilus, Dioscorides, Galen, Paul of Ægina, and others, as well as with the ancient medical celebrities of second and third rank. Briefly, medical knowledge in its entirety was contained in the cloisters of the middle ages; the cloisters, indeed, furnished a considerably larger quota of the medical profession than the laity. In such a state of affairs it might have been expected that the monks and priests should have applied their extensive medical knowledge to combat the terrible abuses which had invaded medicine in connection with the names and the bones of the saints. But this they never did, neither during the middle ages or later on. Priesthood has never seriously attempted to promote medical enlightenment. On the contrary, plenty of writings exist in which the crassest superstition in medico-physical affairs was defended by the clergy, who quite frequently exhibit the same spirit while practising medicine. Medical relief obtained by entirely terrestrial remedies they speedily placed to the credit of the saints, as was done, for instance, by the monks of Monte Cassino, when (as we have seen above) they persuaded the emperor Henry II. that not the temporal hands of the friar physicians had performed an operation for stone upon him, but that St. Benedict in person had, with his own holy hands, extracted the stone from the imperial bladder.
By leading the laity, in numerous cases and against their better knowledge and conscience, to believe that the aid of the saints, and of the relics originating from them, was far superior to medical services, the Christian priests of the middle ages have on their part contributed quite a considerable share to the horrors of medical superstition. It is true, we must not overlook the fact that monks and priests of the middle ages were the product of their time, in the same manner as we of modern times are the product of our period. And as the middle ages formed an era of miracles, of demons, devils, and witches, numerous members of the clergy, as children of their time, surely had an essentially different opinion of the belief in miracles and demons from that which we have. The conception of miracles was entirely different during the middle ages from what it is in modern times; for the sincere and firm belief in the omnipotence of the one God, which with Christianity had taken possession of the world, had firmly fixed in the Christian mind of that period the idea that God was able at any moment to manifest his omnipotence by changing the course of terrestrial phenomena, and actually did manifest it. Thus to a Christian of the middle ages it did not appear miraculous that an alteration in the course of natural law should occur. It was considered quite conceivable that the same natural phenomena should spring from one cause to-day and from a different one to-morrow, according to the pleasure of God; it would have been just as inconceivable to the early Christians, and to their later coreligionists of the middle ages, that all natural processes are carried into effect according to eternally unalterable laws, beyond the interference of divinity, as it is incomprehensible to us to conceive that God would at any time change a law of nature in favor of one or the other mortal being. The conception of miracle during the first sixteen centuries of the Christian era was entirely different from that of the subsequent era. We must not, therefore, gauge the ideas of priests and laymen of those centuries who believed in medical miracles by the same standard as that by which we judge those who to-day still persist in admitting the existence of medico-physical wonder or miracle. It is highly probable that, under conditions as described above, many Christian monks and priests vacillated between the requirements of faith and the results of their own medical knowledge. The medieval scholar’s feeling drew him to one side, his intelligence to the other, and thus he became destitute of a firm hold—the intellectual sport of his period and of his environment. That prominent lights of the Church could become subject to such vacillations we learn from Gregory of Tours, who attempted to cure bodily ailments at one time with the medicaments of professional medicine, at other times with the saving means of the celestial drug-store; who at one time deprecated the art of temporal physicians in favor of medically skilled saints, at other times fled to human medicine for refuge.
Finally the position of the medically learned monk and priest with reference to the general public, during the middle ages, was by no means an easy or an agreeable one. The people clung with invincible tenacity to the belief in demons and miracles. Ancient as well as Christian philosophy was firmly pledged to a belief in demons, whose existence was supported by the sacred testimony of the Gospel. It is not astonishing, therefore, that the people should cling to their belief in various forms of supernatural interference with the functions of organic beings, and thus it may frequently have happened that a medically enlightened priest, fearing the opposition of a people eager after celestial medicine, sacrificed his scientific convictions to the caprices of a mistaken faith. Unfortunately, only a few had in them the making of a scientific martyr, and the history of Christianity teaches us that it is much easier to be a martyr of faith than a martyr of science.