o the priests of Jahveh, and so died. Hence it
was that St. Bernard declared that monks who took medicine were guilty
of conduct unbecoming to religion. Even the School of Salerno was held
in aversion by multitudes of strict churchmen, since it prescribed rules
for diet, thereby indicating a belief that diseases arise from natural
causes and not from the malice of the devil: moreover, in the medical
schools Hippocrates was studied, and he had especially declared that
demoniacal possession is "nowise more divine, nowise more infernal, than
any other disease." Hence it was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council,
about the beginning of the thirteenth century, forbade physicians,
under pain of exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment
without calling in ecclesiastical advice.

This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two hundred and
fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing the command of Pope
Innocent and enforcing it with penalties. Not only did Pope Pius order
that all physicians before administering treatment should call in "a
physician of the soul," on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily
infirmity frequently arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the
end of three days the patient had not made confession to a priest, the
medical man should cease his treatment, under pain of being deprived of
his right to practise, and of expulsion from the faculty if he were a
professor, and that every physician and professor of medicine should
make oath that he was strictly fulfilling these conditions.

Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which made the
development of medicine still more difficult--the classing of scientific
men generally with sorcerers and magic-mongers: from this largely rose
the charge of atheism against physicians, which ripened into a proverb,
"Where there are three physicians there are two atheists."(306)

(306) "Ubi sunt tres medici ibi sunt duo athei." For the bull of Pius V,
see the Bullarium Romanum, ed. Gaude, Naples, 1882, tom. vii, pp. 430,
431.

Magic was so common a charge that many physicians seemed to believe
it themselves. In the tenth century Gerbert, afterward known as
Pope Sylvester II, was at once suspected of sorcery when he showed a
disposition to adopt scientific methods; in the eleventh century this
charge nearly cost the life of Constantine Africanus when he broke from
the beaten path of medicine; in the thirteenth,