the popular mind: "Two
lazy beggars, one blind, the other lame, try to avoid the relics of St.
Martin, borne about in procession, so that they may not be healed
and lose their claim to alms. The blind man takes the lame man on his
shoulders to guide him, but they are caught in the crowd and healed
against their will."(312)

(311) See Baas, p. 614; also Biedermann.

(312) For the efficacy of flowers, see the Bollandist Lives of the
Saints, cited in Fort, p. 279; also pp. 457, 458. For the story of those
unwillingly cured, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Prof.
T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, London, 1890, pp. 52, 182.

Very important also throughout the Middle Ages were the medical
virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had early Oriental
sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny devotes a considerable
part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved it; Vespasian, when he
visited Alexandria, is said to have cured a blind man by applying saliva
to his eves; but the great example impressed most forcibly upon the
medieval mind was the use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus
himself: thence it came not only into Church ceremonial, but largely
into medical practice.(313)

(313) As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of St.
Angelo, and Other Essays, London, 1877, pp. 208 and elsewhere. For
Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211; see also the book of
Tobit, chap. xi, 2-13. For the case of Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of
Vespasian; also Tacitus, Historiae, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St.
Francis Xavier, see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier,
London, 1872.

As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every country had its
long list of saints, each with a special power over some one organ or
disease. The clergy, having great influence over the medical schools,
conscientiously mixed this fetich medicine with the beginnings of
science. In the tenth century, even at the School of Salerno, we find
that the sick were cured not only by medicine, but by the relics of St.
Matthew and others.

Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making various
pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them to become
unfashionable. Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo and St. Damian in
great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but out of fashion and without
efficacy afterward, so we find in the thirteen