crusaders.

Hospitals for the sick, orphanages for foundlings, and great
institutions for the proper care of paupers developed with immense
strides, and during the twelfth century expanded into gigantic
proportions. In the ensuing age, the mediaeval mind was fired with a
faith in the efficacy of unstinted charity; members of society, from
holy pontiff to the humblest recluse by the wayside, rivalled each
other in gratuities of clothing and food, founding of hospitals, and
endowment of beneficent public institutions. St. Louis's highest claim
to pious glory arose from his restless and unstinted charities to the
indigent and sick. Even the lepers, which were shunned or segregated,
were treated by Christian institutions; and saints and saintesses
found pious expression for their humility in personal attendance and
even loving embraces of these unsightly beings covered with repulsive
sores. For the last millennium there has not been a time when
Christian love and benevolence have not sought the opportunity of
ministering to the sick.

One can easily recognize the effect which this fact would have on
mental healing. The church fostered the ideas of exorcism and the
cures by relics and shrines, and deprecated the use of medicine. If
the hospitals and infirmaries were almost wholly in the hands of the
monks and churchmen, there was little hope for the development of
other than ecclesiastical mental healing. The untold good which
Christian ministrations to the sick accomplished must be acknowledged,
but it was not an unmixed benefit to the race as a whole.

We may more easily see, perhaps, the connection between the church and
the development of medicine, and the despotic power of the church in
this regard, when we remember that physicians were formerly a part of
the clergy, and it was not until 1542 that the papal legate in France
gave them permission to marry. In 1552 the doctors in law obtained
like permission. An early priestly physician has survived to fame by
the name of Elpideus, sometimes confused with Elpidius Rusticus. He
was both a deacon of the church and a skilled surgeon, and was very
favorably mentioned by St. Ennodius as a person of fine culture. He
was sufficiently dexterous and skilful to heal the Gothic ruler,
Theodoric, of a grievous illness.[18] Salverte gives us additional
examples: "Richard Fitz-Nigel, who died Bishop of London, in 1198, had
been apothecary to Henry II. The celebrated Roger Bacon, who