piate his crime by a pilgrimage to
the Holy Land, where he died in poverty and exile.

This restriction was continued for three centuries, and consequently
threw medical work into the hands of charlatans among Christians, and
of Jews. The clergy of the city of Hall protested that "it were better
to die with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the
devil." The Jesuit professor, Stengal, said that God permits illness
because of His wish to glorify Himself through the miracles wrought by
the church, and His desire to test the faith of men by letting them
choose between the holy aid of the church and the illicit resort to
medicine.

There was another reason for the antagonism of the church to
physicians; the physicians in this case were inside the church. The
monks converted medicine to the basest uses. In connection with the
authority of the church, it was employed for extorting money from the
sick. They knew little or nothing about medicine, so used charms,
amulets, and relics in healing. The ignorance and cupidity of the
monks led the Lateran Council, under the pontificate of Calixtus II,
in 1123, to forbid priests and monks to attend the sick otherwise than
as ministers of religion. It had little or no effect, so that Innocent
II, in a council at Rheims in 1131, enforced the decree prohibiting
the monks frequenting schools of medicine, and directing them to
confine their practice to their own monasteries. They still disobeyed,
and a Lateran Council in 1139 threatened all who neglected its orders
with the severest penalties and suspension from the exercise of all
ecclesiastical functions; such practices were denounced as a neglect
of the sacred objects of their profession in exchange for ungodly
lucre. When the priests found that they could no longer confine the
practice of medicine to themselves, it was stigmatized and denounced.
At the Council of Tours in 1163, Alexander III maintained that through
medicine the devil tried to seduce the priesthood, and threatened with
excommunication any ecclesiastic who studied medicine. In 1215,
Innocent III fulminated an anathema against surgery and any priest
practising it. Even this was not effectual.[17]

What we see in connection with dissection and surgery and medicine was
repeated at a later date with inoculation, vaccination, and
anaesthetics. There were the same objections by the church on
theological grounds, the same stubborn battle, and the same
inevitable