as due almost entirely to Jewish physicians, and it developed medical
studies to a yet higher point, doing much to create a medical profession
worthy of the name throughout southern Europe.

As to the Arabians, we find them from the tenth to the fourteenth
century, especially in Spain, giving much thought to medicine, and to
chemistry as subsidiary to it. About the beginning of the ninth century,
when the greater Christian writers were supporting fetich by theology,
Almamon, the Moslem, declared, "They are the elect of God, his best
and most useful servants, whose lives are devoted to the improvement of
their rational faculties." The influence of Avicenna, the translator
of the works of Aristotle, extended throughout all Europe during the
eleventh century. The Arabians were indeed much fettered by tradition
in medical science, but their translations of Hippocrates and Galen
preserved to the world the best thus far developed in medicine, and
still better were their contributions to pharmacy: these remain of value
to the present hour.(303)

(303) For the great services rendered to the development of medicine by
the Jews, see Monteil, Medecine en France, p. 58; also the historians of
medicine generally. For the quotation from Almamon, see Gibbon, vol.
x, p. 42. For the services of both Jews and Arabians, see Bedarride,
Histoire des Juifs, p. 115; also Sismondi, Histoire des Francais, tome
i, p. 191. For the Arabians, especially, see Rosseeuw Saint-Hilaire,
Histoire d'Espagne, Paris, 1844, vol. iii, pp. 191 et seq. For
the tendency of the Mosaic books to insist on hygienic rather than
therapeutical treatment, and its consequences among Jewish physicians,
see Sprengel, but especially Fredault, p.14.

Various Christian laymen also rose above the prevailing theologic
atmosphere far enough to see the importance of promoting scientific
development. First among these we may name the Emperor Charlemagne; he
and his great minister, Alcuin, not only promoted medical studies in the
schools they founded, but also made provision for the establishment of
botanic gardens in which those herbs were especially cultivated which
were supposed to have healing virtues. So, too, in the thirteenth
century, the Emperor Frederick II, though under the ban of the Pope,
brought together in his various journeys, and especially in his
crusading expeditions, many Greek and Arabic manuscripts, and took
special pains to have those which concerne