instead of surrounding themselves with a few tatterdemalions; the monasteries, while distributing their charity, became by seizing upon the land a cause of impoverishment for a vast radius around them. They relieved a few poor people; but these were infinitely less to be pitied than thousands of peasants crushed under feudal laws, the ecclesiastical tenth, or the laws of the royal treasury. The problem of how to aid the poor without increasing pauperism and without offering a reward to idleness, so difficult even to modern France, was not one which the Middle Ages could solve. Moreover, the French of the thirteenth century, thoroughly imbued with religious ideas, were charitable not from philanthropy, but from piety; to secure salvation. The "virtuous poor," with knees worn callous by many prostrations, with mouth's full of prayers, well trained and indoctrinated by the Church, always present on the skirts of the sanctuary, always ready to reap the benefit of a pious thought, were very convenient to whoever wished to acquit himself of the Christian duty of charity. Poverty was too wide-spread to be possibly diminished; at least one did what one was called upon to do, leaving the rest to God.

The sick formed a more limited category of the distressed, and charity toward them was more efficacious. From the Merovingian epoch, St. Clotilde and St. Aboflède, the wife and sister of Clovis; St. Radegonde, the wife of Clotaire; St. Bathilde, the wife of Clovis II.,- are cited as founders of hospitals. The hospitals were usually annexed to a monastery, as was that of Bathilde to the royal abbey of Chelles. At the time of the Crusades, the valiant Knights of St. John prided themselves above all upon being Hospitallers. The diffusion of leprosy in the twelfth century brought about the creation of special hospitals - leper-houses. In the thirteenth century there were nearly two thousand of these in France. They were usually managed by Knights of St. Lazarus, another military order. Louis VII. established them at the end of the Faubourg St. Denis; their motherhouse was the domain of Boigny. He also created at Saussaie near Villejuif a convent of women to care for lepers. The kings made large benefactions to these houses: when they died, their personal linen and all their horses, mules, etc., belonged to the leper-house of La Saussaie. When Jean II. died in England, so that the house was deprived of his horses, his son paid it an indemnity. Later, Charles VI. bought back from this convent for

twenty-five hundred francs the horses of his father Charles V. The knights showed themselves deserving of these favors by caring not only for the lepers, but for all kinds of invalids.

St. Louis was a Grand-Hospitaller. It was he who enlarged and endowed the Maison-Dieu (Hotel-Dieu) of Paris, who founded the Hospital of the Quinze-Vingts for three hundred blind men, who instituted the hostelleries des postes in the principal towns of the kingdom. Devout nobles followed his example; and in the thirteenth century Elzéar de Sabran and his wife are cited as having given everything-life and fortune-to the service of the sick.

The Church did not content itself with offering prayers for travelers. In the most difficult passes of the mountains, in the snows of the Alps, rose pious hostelries: those of St. Bernard, of St. Gothard, of the Simplon, of Mont Cenis, are of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The wars with the Saracens, the Mussulman piracy on the Mediterranean, peopled the markets and prisons of the Orient and Africa with Christian captives. Religious orders, the Mathurins, founded in 1198, and the Fathers of Mercy, founded in 1223,- went with money to ransom Christian prisoners.

Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Jane
Grosvenor Cooke

FRENCH MEDICAL SCIENCE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES From the History of French Civilization'

HE most celebrated physicians of antiquity were among the Greeks, Hippocrates of Cos, Galen of Pergamus, Herophilus, Erasistratus; among the Romans, Celsus and Cœlius Aurelianus. Their knowledge of anatomy was still imperfect; their physiology amounted to nothing, since they were not acquainted either with the circulation of the blood or the functions of the nervous system; their remedies were few, and often purely imaginary. The downfall of Roman civilization arrested the progress of this science. The Arabs succeeded. In a compilation of a certain Aaron Christian, priest of Alexandria, known under the name of "Pandects of Medicine," they rediscovered extracts from ancient writings. They seized upon these and made some progress. The most celebrated Arabian physicians were

(

Rhazès (850-923), and Avicenna (980-1037), both born in the caliphate of Bagdad; Avenzoar (1072–1162), and Averroës (1120–1198), both Spanish Arabs. Maimonides (1135-1204) was a Jewish rabbi of Spain. The Canon' of Avicenna, translated into Latin, was the medical work most extensively known throughout Europe. Thus Europeans seldom knew the physicians of antiquity except through a triple series of translations from Greek into Syriac, from Syriac into Arabic, and from Arabic into Latin.

For a long time the Christians abandoned the study of medicine to the Arabs and Jews. It was to these infidel masters that later the most daring went to learn the elements of the sci

ence.

Charlemagne in 805 had prescribed the study of medicine in the monasteries. About the ninth century, the school of Salerno in Italy began to be famous throughout Christendom. In the tenth century some Jews founded the school of Montpellier, which in the thirteenth became a faculty. In 1200 the University of Paris was founded, which was not until later anything more than a faculty of medicine; but already in 1213 there was question of professors of medicine. The Church showed little favor to this science, which seemed an evidence of distrust toward Providence. "The precepts of medicine are contrary to Divine knowledge," wrote St. Ambrose: "they condemn prayers and vigils." The councils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbade the study of this art to prelates and archdeacons, and only permitted it to the lower clergy. No clergyman could practice surgery, because it sheds blood. Boniface VIII. menaced with excommunication whoever should dissect a dead body.

Anatomy being proscribed; the natural sciences, such as botany, mineralogy, and chemistry, being in their infancy,—one can imagine our medical science of the Middle Ages. It consisted of prescriptions often childish and incomplete; observations borrowed from antiquity or from the Arabs. The prejudices and superstitions of the time played an important part in it. The doctors, also called physicians or mires, were also alchemists and astrologers. They taught that the brain increases and decreases according to the phases of the moon; that it has, like the sea, its ebb and flow twice a day. The purpose of the lungs was to air the heart, the liver was the seat of love, the spleen that of laughter. They made use of formulas and cabalistic words; they ordered strange remedies, such as the liver of a toad, the blood of a

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frog, a rat, or a goat; they sought universal remedies or panaceas; they bled people only upon certain days, and after having observed the position of the stars and the phases of the moon. Such-and-such a remedy was good for the noble but bad for the serf; the noble must purge himself with hyssop, the peasant with myrobolan. The one cured a fracture with an earth bolus; the other with the dung of his cattle.

Surgery was considered an inferior art. As the clergy was forbidden to exercise it, it was separated from medicine. It was abandoned to the practitioners who had not received degrees, and who were also barbers and even bath-keepers. Even in the seventeenth century, in 1613, there were corporations of surgeonbarbers. They shaved people, bled them, and bandaged their wounds. The surgeons traced their organization into a corporation back to St. Louis, but their Collège de Saint-Côme does not seem to date farther back than the fourteenth century. They were placed under the authority of the "king's barber," who had his delegates in all the towns of the kingdom.

Further, the doctors and surgeon-barbers served only the nobles and the rich. The people had their own therapeutics; in medicine, the remedies of wise women and sorcerers; in surgery, the bone-setters, who had charms and secrets for restoring broken limbs with ointments of their own composition, sighs of the cross, and formulas. The bone-setter above all others was the executioner: since he understood so well how to break limbs, he ought to understand how to mend them. It was he who furnished a precious panacea,—the fat of the hanged.

They believed, too, that a donkey's breath expelled all poison. Aching teeth they cured by touching them with a dead man's tooth. To arrest hemorrhage or nose-bleed they dropped a key down the back. By spitting in the mouth of a living frog they stopped a cough.

Rather than apply to the doctor they had recourse to the apothecary, who, in spite of the prohibitions of the faculty, took a part in healing. Charlatans swarmed.

Religion too had its medicine, in which Christian beliefs were amalgamated with old pagan superstitions. Epilepsy was then called the sacred evil, the Divine evil. The epileptic was believed to be possessed by a demon; the only consideration was to drive out the evil spirit from him. Therefore the priest sprinkled him with holy water; and while the sufferer was rolling in

convulsions, read the formula of exorcism. It is known that nervous maladies are easily communicated to persons with sensitive nerves; thus the demon driven from one body often gave himself the pleasure of entering into the body of a spectator, who writhed in his turn. Sometimes in revenge he entered into the exorciser. The possessed were also cured by a pilgrimage to Saint-Maur near Paris, by a novena at the church of BonSecours near Nancy, or by touching the holy cerement at Besançon.

Heaven was peopled with healing saints. If one had sore throat he addressed himself to Saint Christopher; if dropsy, to Saint Eutropius; if fever, to Saint Pernella; if insanity, to Saint Mathurin; if the plague, to Saint Roque; if hydrophobia, to Saint Hubert, the patron of the chase and of dogs. At the monastery of Saint Hubert, near Liege, a monk touched the patient with the saint's stole, and cauterized him with "the key of Saint Hubert."

Often the choice of the saint was determined by a kind of pun. For scurf (teigne) they addressed to Saint Aignan (pronounced "Saint Teignan "); for trouble with the eyes, to Saint Claire; for gout, to Saint Genou (genou, knee); for cramps, to Saint Crampan.

Certain maladies were even designated only by the name of the saint who cured them: thus Saint Vitus's dance, a nervous disease which we now call chorea; Saint John's ill, which was epilepsy; Saint Anthony's evil, which was canker; Saint Eloy's evil, which was scurvy; Saint Firmin's evil, which was erysipelas; Saint Lazarus's evil, which was leprosy; Saint Quentin's evil, which was dropsy; Saint Sylvan's evil, which seems to have been a kind of eruptive fever.

The monks who practiced this medicine sometimes drew illicit profits from it. In the thirteenth century, those of Saint Anthony were accused of receiving into their hospitals only healthy people, upon whose bodies they painted apparent sores, and then sent them to solicit the charity of the faithful. Those of Saint Sylvan retained as serfs those who had recovered their health under the porch of their church. In order to increase the number of supplicants they forbade all competition. In 1263 they prohibited women from attempting "to heal those afflicted with Saint Sylvan's evil, with the exception of the lord and any of his family"; for these could not be reduced to serfdom.