en; hence surgery remained down to the fifteenth
century a despised profession, its practice continued largely in
the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period the
name "barber-surgeon" was a survival of this. In such surgery, the
application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the
hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction
with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.(310)

(310) On the low estate of surgery during the Middle Ages, see
the histories of medicine already cited, and especially Kotelmann,
Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, Hamburg, 1890, pp. 216 et seq.

The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the Church
continued during century after century, and here probably lay the main
causes of hostility between the Church on the one hand and the better
sort of physicians on the other; namely, in the fact that the Church
supposed herself in possession of something far better than scientific
methods in medicine. Under the sway of this belief a natural and
laudable veneration for the relics of Christian martyrs was developed
more and more into pure fetichism.

Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped was
used as a purgative; water in which St. Remy's ring had been dipped
cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured
lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St. Gall cured
tumours; St. Valentine cured epilepsy; St. Christopher, throat diseases;
St. Eutropius, dropsy; St. Ovid, deafness; St. Gervase, rheumatism; St.
Apollonia, toothache; St. Vitus, St. Anthony, and a multitude of other
saints, the maladies which bear their names. Even as late as 1784 we
find certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a
mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St. Hubert, and
not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical cure.(311)
In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted by causing the
invalid to drink water in which St. Bernard had washed his hands.
Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a saint, when steeped in water,
were supposed to be especially efficacious in various diseases. The
pulpit everywhere dwelt with unction on the reality of fetich cures, and
among the choice stories collected by Archbishop Jacques de Vitry for
the use of preachers was one which, judging from its frequent recurrence
in monkish literature, must have sunk deep into