monks, and
a multitude of other councils enforced this decree. About the middle of
the same century St. Bernard still complained that monks had too much to
do with medicine; and a few years later we have decretals like those of
Pope Alexander III forbidding monks to study or practise it. For
many generations there appear evidences of a desire among the more
broad-minded churchmen to allow the cultivation of medical science among
ecclesiastics: Popes like Clement III and Sylvester II seem to have
favoured this, and we even hear of an Archbishop of Canterbury skilled
in medicine; but in the beginning of the thirteenth century the Fourth
Council of the Lateran forbade surgical operations to be practised by
priests, deacons, and subdeacons; and some years later Honorius III
reiterated this decree and extended it. In 1243 the Dominican order
forbade medical treatises to be brought into their monasteries, and
finally all participation of ecclesiastics in the science and art of
medicine was effectually prevented.(305)

(305) For statements as to these decrees of the highest Church and
monastic authorities against medicine and surgery, see Sprengel, Baas,
Geschichte der Medicin, p. 204, and elsewhere; also Buckle, Posthumous
Works, vol. ii, p. 567. For a long list of Church dignitaries who
practised a semi-theological medicine in the Middle Ages, see Baas,
pp. 204, 205. For Bertharius, Hildegard, and others mentioned, see also
Sprengel and other historians of medicine. For clandestine study and
practice of medicine by sundry ecclesiastics in spite of the prohibition
by the Church, see Von Raumer, Hohenstaufen, vol. vi, p. 438. For some
remarks on this subject by an eminent and learned ecclesiastic,
see Ricker, O. S. B., professor in the University of Vienna,
Pastoral-Psychiatrie, 1894, pp. 12,13.

VII. THEOLOGICAL DISCOURAGEMENT OF MEDICINE.

While various churchmen, building better than they knew, thus did
something to lay foundations for medical study, the Church authorities,
as a rule, did even more to thwart it among the very men who, had they
been allowed liberty, would have cultivated it to the highest advantage.

Then, too, we find cropping out every where the feeling that, since
supernatural means are so abundant, there is something irreligious
in seeking cure by natural means: ever and anon we have appeals to
Scripture, and especially to the case of King Asa, who trusted to
physicians rather than t