ightest occasion as to require nothing which in these days
would be regarded as adequate evidence.

In this atmosphere of theologic thought medical science was at once
checked. The School of Alexandria, under the influence first of Jews and
later of Christians, both permeated with Oriental ideas, and taking into
their theory of medicine demons and miracles, soon enveloped everything
in mysticism. In the Byzantine Empire of the East the same cause
produced the same effect; the evolution of ascertained truth in
medicine, begun by Hippocrates and continued by Herophilus, seemed lost
forever. Medical science, trying to advance, was like a ship becalmed
in the Sargasso Sea: both the atmosphere about it and the medium through
which it must move resisted all progress. Instead of reliance upon
observation, experience, experiment, and thought, attention was turned
toward supernatural agencies.(299)

(299) For the mysticism which gradually enveloped the School of
Alexandria, see Barthelemy Saint-Hilaire, De l'Ecole d'Alexandrie,
Paris, 1845, vol. vi, p. 161. For the effect of the new doctrines on the
Empire of the East, see Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 240. As to the more common
miracles of healing and the acknowledgment of non-Christian miracles of
healing by Christian fathers, see Fort, p. 84.

IV. THE ATTRIBUTION OF DISEASE TO SATANIC INFLUENCE.

--"PASTORAL MEDICINE" CHECKS SCIENTIFIC EFFORT.

Especially prejudicial to a true development of medical science among
the first Christians was their attribution of disease to diabolic
influence. As we have seen, this idea had come from far, and, having
prevailed in Chaldea, Egypt, and Persia, had naturally entered into the
sacred books of the Hebrews. Moreover, St. Paul had distinctly declared
that the gods of the heathen were devils; and everywhere the early
Christians saw in disease the malignant work of these dethroned powers
of evil. The Gnostic and Manichaean struggles had ripened the theologic
idea that, although at times diseases are punishments by the Almighty,
the main agency in them is Satanic. The great fathers and renowned
leaders of the early Church accepted and strengthened this idea. Origen
said: "It is demons which produce famine, unfruitfulness, corruptions
of the air, pestilences; they hover concealed in clouds in the lower
atmosphere, and are attracted by the blood and incense which the heathen
offer to them as gods." St. Augustine said: "All diseases