rteenth century, the Dominican Order forbade all ecclesiastics
to have any connection with medicine; and when we remember that the
policy of the Church had made it impossible for any learned man to enter
any other profession, the only resource left for a scholar was the
Church; so effectively did the Church kill all scientific endeavors.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory of medicine.
The Church of England accepted the doctrine of "royal touch," and in a
prayer book of that period is found a service provided for that occasion
which states that "They (the kings), shall lay their hands on the sick,
and they shall recover."

Pestilences were taught to be punishments inflicted by God on society
for its shortcomings. Modern man has no conception of the ravages of
infections and epidemics that swept over Europe in the Middle Ages, and
to a lesser extent, until less than fifty years ago. Tacitus described
the plague in Rome thus: "Houses were filled with dead bodies, and the
streets with funerals.... Alike, slaves and plebeians were suddenly
taken off amidst lamentations of their wives and children, who, while
they mourned the dead, were themselves seized with the disease, and,
perishing, were burned on the same funeral pyre."

In 80 A.D. an epidemic swept Rome causing 10,000 deaths daily. During
the ages until the present century, wave after wave of pestilence swept
over Europe. The plague in 1384 A.D. took no less than 60 million lives.
It was estimated that twenty-five per cent. of the population of the
then known world perished in that one epidemic. Between 1601 and 1603,
127,000 died of the plague in Moscow. The epidemic of 1630 took 500,000
lives in the Venetian republic; Milan alone lost 88,000. In 1605, London
lost 69,000; 70,000 died in Vienna in 1679; the following year Prague
lost 83,000, all from this disease. The horrors of such visitations are
beyond description, and can scarcely be imagined. For a time, attempts
were made to collect and bury the dead. Wagons would pass through the
streets at night collecting the victims. The drivers, benumbed with
drink, frequently failed to ascertain whether death had occurred. Living
patients, desperately ill, were piled into the wagons with corpses
beneath, about, and on them. These gruesome loads were dumped pell-mell
into huge pits hastily dug for the purpose. In some instances, living
victims crawled out of these pits and survived to tell the tale