"An evil custom as we consider it and detestable has grown up by which monks and regular canons after having received the habit and made their profession, spurning the rule of their blessed masters Benedict and Augustine, learn secular law and medicine for the sake of temporal gain. Inflamed by the fire of avarice they make themselves the patrons of causes [that is the attorneys of legal proceedings] and when they ought to be devoting themselves to psalmody and hymns, confiding in the support of a fine voice and the variety of their pleas, they confound justice and injustice, right and wrong. Imperial constitutions attest that it is absurd, nay even an opprobrium, for members of the clerical order to wish to be skilled in forensic disputation. We decree that violators of the religious life of this kind should fall under the severe judgment of the apostolical authority, for as they have neglected the cure of souls and in no way attend to the purpose of their order, promising health for filthy lucre, they make themselves guardians of human bodies. And since an impure eye is the index of an impure heart and since religion ought not to deal with those things even to talk about which brings the blush of shame to the cheek of honesty, in order therefore that the monastic and canonical order should be preserved inviolably pleasing to God in its holy purpose, we interdict by the apostolical authority that any such proceeding should be allowed hereafter. Bishops therefore and abbots and priors who consent to such an enormity shall be deprived of their own dignities."
The Council of Tours held under Pope Alexander III, A.D. 1163, Canon VIII. That religious should avoid secular studies.
"Not only does the envy of the old enemy of mankind bring him to labor greatly to destroy the infirm members of the Church, but he also puts his hand to securing the desirable members of the Church and strives even to supplant the elect according to the saying of the Scriptures 'for the elect are his food.' He plumes himself if he can bring about the fall of many, but especially if he can bring down some more distinguished member of the Church by making him lukewarm. Hence it is that he knows how to transfigure himself after his usual fashion into an angel of light, so that under the pretext of caring for the health of ailing brethren and more faithfully carrying out ecclesiastical business he leads members of the regular religious orders to the study of law and of physical problems which have to be given attention outside of the cloister. For this reason, so that spiritual men under the pretext of science may not again become involved in mundane affairs and themselves lose their interior life while they are thinking to provide for others in the exterior, we have decreed by the assent of the present council in the endeavor to meet this evil, that no one at all after taking the vows of religion or the making of religious profession should be allowed to absent himself from the cloister for the study of medicine and physic. If however he has already absented himself and shall not have returned to his cloister within the space of two months he is to be avoided by all as excommunicate, and if he should presume to try the effect of patronage in no case should [{427}] he be heard. On his return to the cloister he must always be the last of the brothers in the choir and unless by the special indult or permission of the Holy See must lose hope of all promotion."
The Council of Paris, A.D. 1212, Second Part, Canon XX.
"Since certain of the members of the regular orders under the pretense of caring for the bodies of ailing brother members and of more faithfully managing ecclesiastical affairs, to use the words of the Lateran Council, have not hesitated to go out of their cloisters to learn mundane law and give themselves to the study of physical problems in order to give their time to jurisprudence and medicine and on account of that are lacking in the interior life because they are devoting themselves to care for external things, we walking closely in the footsteps of that council decree that unless within the space of two months such students of law and medicine return to their cloisters, in spite of the permission of their abbot, which he is not empowered to give, they are to be excommunicated and avoided by all; and in no case if they should endeavor to use patronage to aid them are they to be admitted.
"We prohibit also anyone who enters the cloister for the sake of religion to go out of it in order to go to school; whatever a student may wish he should learn in the cloister. Those who are now in the schools should within two months return to the cloister."
Decree of the Council of Montpellier held under Pope Alexander III, 1162.
Since the proceedings of this Council are not extant the records of it are preserved in two monuments. One an Epistle of Pope Alexander to the Bishop of Verona and the other the decrees of the Council of Montpellier held in 1195 which enacted similar legislation.
Cap. 15. "The Council prohibited besides under the full severity of ecclesiastical discipline any monk or canon regular or other member of a religious order to take up the study of secular laws or medicine. Anyone violating this statute must be canonically published by the diocesan Bishops according to the decree promulgated in this matter under Pope Alexander in the Council of Montpellier."
It has been suggested that this exclusion of monks and religious from the study of medicine by Church ordinance practically shut out all the clerics, that is, all the educated men of the medieval period, from the medical profession. Any such idea, however, could only have occurred to one who does not realize that at any given time there are only a comparatively few religious and a great many secular clergymen. Practically all those who could read and write in the Middle Ages were known as clerks, that is clerics, and were under the protection of the Church, most of them indeed receiving minor orders, and if all the clergy were to have been excluded [{428}] from the medical profession this contention would be true. So far is it from the truth, however, that a number of the great physicians and surgeons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries belonged to the clerical orders, not a few of them were priests and some of the greatest of them, like Theodoric, were actually bishops. It was only the religious, that is the men who had specially devoted their lives to monasticism, who were forbidden to take up the study of medicine because it did not comport with their monastic vocation.