in Germany, depending chiefly on mineral remedies, mercury,
antimony, sulphur, arsenic, and the use, sometimes the secret use, of
opium. Whatever we think of Paracelsus, the chief agent in the
introduction of these remedies, and whatever limits we may assign to the
use of these long-trusted mineral drugs, there can be no doubt that the
chemical school, as it was called, did a great deal towards the
expurgation of the old, overloaded, and repulsive pharmacopoeia. We
shall find evidence in the practice of our New-England physicians of the
first century, that they often employed chemical remedies, and that, by
the early part of the following century, their chief trust was in the few
simple, potent drugs of Paracelsus.

We have seen that many of the practitioners of medicine, during the first
century of New England, were clergymen. This relation between medicine
and theology has existed from a very early period; from the Egyptian
priest to the Indian medicine-man, the alliance has been maintained in
one form or another. The partnership was very common among our British
ancestors. Mr. Ward, the Vicar of Stratford-on-Avon, himself a notable
example of the union of the two characters, writing about 1660, says,

"The Saxons had their blood-letters, but under the Normans physicke,
begunne in England; 300 years agoe itt was not a distinct profession by
itself, but practised by men in orders, witness Nicholas de Ternham, the
chief English physician and Bishop of Durham; Hugh of Evesham, a
physician and cardinal; Grysant, physician and pope; John Chambers, Dr.
of Physick, was the first Bishop of Peterborough; Paul Bush, a bachelor
of divinitie in Oxford, was a man well read in physick as well as
divinitie, he was the first bishop of Bristol."

"Again in King Richard the Second's time physicians and divines were not
distinct professions; for one Tydeman, Bishop of Landaph and Worcester,
was physician to King Richard the Second."

This alliance may have had its share in creating and keeping up the many
superstitions which have figured so largely in the history of medicine.
It is curious to see that a medical work left in manuscript by the Rev.
Cotton Mather and hereafter to be referred to, is running over with
follies and superstitious fancies; while his contemporary and
fellow-townsman, William Douglass, relied on the same few simple remedies
which, through Dr. Edward Holyoke and Dr. James Jackson, have come down
to our own time