cannot
understand the motives and acts of our forefathers, wrote Henry C. Lea,
in a "History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages," unless we take
into consideration the mental condition engendered by the consciousness
of a daily and hourly personal contact with Satan.

Charlatans were not unknown in the fifth century B. C. For the great
Hippocrates inveighed against those who relied on amulets and charms as
curative agents. In his view, the physician should possess a mind of
such serenity and dignity as to be superior to superstition, for the
latter is incompatible with a knowledge of the truth.[211:1]

The Romans of old, who drove nails into the walls of the Temple of
Jupiter, in the hope of warding off the Plague, employed thereby a quack
remedy.

Indeed, for more than six hundred years, they had no physicians, but
employed theurgic methods of treatment by means of prayers, charms, and
prescriptions from the ancient Sibylline Books, which were reputed to
date from the reign of Tarquin the Proud, in the sixth century B. C.
These volumes were kept in a stone chest, under ground, in the Temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus at Rome. The ancient Romans possessed only the rude
surgery and domestic medicine of the barbarians, until the importation
of scientific methods from Greece. Cato the Censor (B. C. 234-149)
disliked physicians, partly because they were mostly Greeks, and partly
because he himself, although venerated as a model of Roman virtue, was
an outrageous quack, who thought himself equal to a whole college of
physicians.[212:1]

From a very early time, and for many centuries, medical pretenders and
empirics were known as "magicians." Practitioners of this class throve
exceedingly during the reigns of several Roman emperors. They strove to
work upon the imaginations of the people by sensational curative
methods. Inasmuch, wrote Dr. Hugo Magnus, as whatever is curious and
unusual, has always possessed a special fascination for humanity, the
incredible remedies of the magicians found everywhere hosts of
believers. And as the most nonsensical theories, if well tinged with the
miraculous, find eager credence, there developed a rude form of
psycho-therapy. For by the employment of extraordinary and even
loathsome substances, many of which had no value as material remedies,
they sought to impress curative ideas upon the minds of their patients,
and doubtless very often with success. Inventive genius must have been
sorel