and church, while frequently secretly consulting them, openly
proscribed them.

Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been
partially cured of disease of the eyes by St. Martin, sought
further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither
the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward. Popes Eugene IV,
Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to
employ them. The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the
Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of
Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and
the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in
the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful
to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as
John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against
them and all who consulted them. As late as the middle of the
seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in
Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on
account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the
city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die
with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil."
Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even
popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.[[45]]


      VIII. FETICH CURES UNDER PROTESTANTISM.--THE ROYAL TOUCH.

The Reformation made no sudden change in the sacred theory
of medicine. Luther, as is well known, again and again ascribed
his own diseases to "devils' spells," declaring that "Satan
produces all the maladies which afflict mankind, for he is the
prince of death," and that "he poisons the air"; but that "no
malady comes from God." From that day down to the faith cures of
Boston, Old Orchard, and among the sect of "Peculiar People" in
our own time, we see the results among Protestants of seeking the
cause of disease in Satanic influence and its cure in fetichism.

Yet Luther, with his sturdy common sense, broke away from
one belief which has interfered with the evolution of medicine
from the dawn of Christianity until now. When that troublesome
declaimer, Carlstadt, declared that "whoso falls sick shall use
no physic, but commit his case to God, praying that His will be
done," Luther asked, "Do you eat when you are hungry?" and the
answer being in the affirmative, he continued, "Even so you may
use physic, which is God's gift just as meat and drink is, or
whatever else we use for the preservation of life." Hence it was,
doubtless, that the Protestant cities of Germany were more ready than
others to admit anatomical investigation by proper dissections.[[46]]

Perhaps the best-known development of a theological view in
the Protestant Church was that mainly evolved in England out of a
French germ of theological thought--a belief in the efficacy of
the royal touch in sundry diseases, especially epilepsy and
scrofula, the latter being consequently known as the king's evil.
This mode of cure began, so far as history throws light upon it,
with Edward the Confessor in the eleventh century, and came down
from reign to reign, passing from the Catholic saint to
Protestant debauchees upon the English throne, with
ever-increasing miraculous efficacy.

Testimony to the reality of these cures is overwhelming. As
a simple matter of fact, there are no miracles of healing in the
history of the human race more thoroughly attested than those
wrought by the touch of Henry VIII, Elizabeth, the Stuarts, and
especially of that chosen vessel, Charles II. Though Elizabeth
could not bring herself fully to believe in the reality of these
cures, Dr. Tooker, the Queen's chaplain, afterward Dean of
Lichfield, testifies fully of his own knowledge to the cures
wrought by her, as also does William Clowes, the Queen's surgeon.
Fuller, in his _Church History_, gives an account of a Roman
Catholic who was thus cured by the Queen's touch and converted to
Protestantism. Similar testimony exists as to cures wrought by
James I. Charles I also enjoyed the same power, in spite of the
public declaration against its reality by Parliament. In one case
the King saw a patient in the crowd, too far off to be touched,
and simply said, "God bless thee and grant thee thy desire";
whereupon, it is asserted, the blotches and humours disappeared
from the patient's body and appeared in the bottle of medicine
which he held in his hand; at least so says Dr. John Nicholas,
Warden of Winchester College, who declares this of his own
knowledge to be every word of it true.

But the most incontrovertible evidence of this miraculous
gift is found in the case of Charles II, the most thoroughly
cynical debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the
advent of George IV. He touched nearly one hundred thousand
persons, and the outlay for gold medals issued to the afflicted
on these occasions rose in some years as high as ten thousand
pounds. John Brown, surgeon in ordinary to his Majesty and to St.
Thomas's Hospital, and author of many learned works on surgery
and anatomy, published accounts of sixty cures due to the touch
of this monarch; and Sergeant-Surgeon Wiseman devotes an entire
book to proving the reality of these cures, saying, "I myself
have been frequent witness to many hundreds of cures performed by
his Majesty's touch alone without any assistance of chirurgery,
and these many of them had tyred out the endeavours of able
chirurgeons before they came thither." Yet it is especially
instructive to note that, while in no other reign were so many
people touched for scrofula, and in none were so many cures
vouched for, in no other reign did so many people die of that
disease: the bills of mortality show this clearly, and the reason
doubtless is the general substitution of supernatural for
scientific means of cure. This is but one out of many examples
showing the havoc which a scientific test always makes among
miracles if men allow it to be applied.

To James II the same power continued; and if it be said, in
the words of Lord Bacon, that "imagination is next of kin to
miracle--a working faith," something else seems required to
account for the testimony of Dr. Heylin to cures wrought by the
royal touch upon babes in their mothers' arms. Myth-making and
marvel-mongering were evidently at work here as in so many other
places, and so great was the fame of these cures that we find, in
the year before James was dethroned, a pauper at Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, petitioning the General Assembly to enable him to make the
voyage to England in order that he may be healed by the royal touch.

The change in the royal succession does not seem to have
interfered with the miracle; for, though William III evidently
regarded the whole thing as a superstition, and on one occasion
is said to have touched a patient, saying to him, "God give you
better health and more sense," Whiston assures us that this
person was healed, notwithstanding William's incredulity.

As to Queen Anne, Dr. Daniel Turner, in his _Art of Surgery_,
relates that several cases of scrofula which had been
unsuccessfully treated by himself and Dr. Charles Bernard,
sergeant-surgeon to her Majesty, yielded afterward to the
efficacy of the Queen's touch. Naturally does Collier, in his
_Ecclesiastical History_, say regarding these cases that to
dispute them "is to come to the extreme of scepticism, to deny
our senses and be incredulous even to ridiculousness." Testimony
to the reality of these cures is indeed overwhelming, and a
multitude of most sober scholars, divines, and doctors of
medicine declared the evidence absolutely convincing. That the
Church of England accepted the doctrine of the royal touch is
witnessed by the special service provided in the _Prayer-Book_ of
that period for occasions when the King exercised this gift.
The ceremony was conducted with great solemnity and pomp:
during the reading of the service and the laying on of the King's
hands, the attendant bishop or priest recited the words, "They
shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover";
afterward came special prayers, the Epistle and Gospel, with the
blessing, and finally his Majesty washed his royal hands in
golden vessels which high noblemen held for him.

In France, too, the royal touch continued, with similar testimony
to its efficacy. On a certain Easter Sunday, that pious king,
Louis XIV, touched about sixteen hundred persons at Versailles.

This curative power was, then, acknowledged far and wide, by
Catholics and Protestants alike, upon the Continent, in Great
Britain, and in America; and it descended not only in spite of
the transition of the English kings from Catholicism to
Protestantism, but in spite of the transition from the legitimate
sovereignty of the Stuarts to the illegitimate succession of the
House of Orange. And yet, within a few years after the whole
world held this belief, it was dead; it had shrivelled away in the
growing scientific light at the dawn of the eighteenth century.[[49]]


           IX. THE SCIENTIFIC STRUGGLE FOR ANATOMY.

We may now take up the evolution of medical science out of
the medieval view and its modern survivals. All through the
Middle Ages, as we have seen, some few laymen and ecclesiastics
here and there, braving the edicts of the Church and popular
superstition, persisted in medical study and practice: this was
especially seen at the greater universities, which had become
somewhat emancipated from ecclesiastical control. In the
thirteenth century the University of Paris gave a strong impulse
to the teaching of medicine, and in that and the following
century we begin to find the first intelligible reports of
medical cases since the coming in of Christianity.

In the thirteenth century also the arch-enemy of the papacy,
the Emperor Frederick II, showed his free-thinking tendencies by
granting, from time to time, permissions to dissect the human
subject. In the centuries following, sundry other monarchs
timidly followed his example: thus John of Aragon, in 1391, gave
to the University of Lerida the privilege of dissecting one dead
criminal every three years.[[50]]

During the fifteenth century and the earlier years of the
sixteenth the revival of learning, the invention of printing, and
the great voyages of discovery gave a new impulse to thought, and
in this medical science shared: the old theological way of
thinking was greatly questioned, and gave place in many quarters
to a different way of looking at the universe.

In the sixteenth century Paracelsus appears--a great genius,
doing much to develop medicine beyond the reach of sacred and
scholastic tradition, though still fettered by many
superstitions. More and more, in spite of theological dogmas,
came a renewal of anatomical studies by dissection of the human
subject. The practice of the old Alexandrian School was thus
resumed. Mundinus, Professor of Medicine at Bologna early in the
fourteenth century, dared use the human subject occasionally in
his lectures; but finally came a far greater champion of scientific
truth, Andreas Vesalius, founder of the modern science of anatomy.
The battle waged by this man is one of the glories of our race.

From the outset Vesalius proved himself a master. In the
search for real knowledge he risked the most terrible dangers,
and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded upon the
teachings of the Church for ages. As we have seen, even such men
in the early Church as Tertullian and St. Augustine held anatomy
in abhorrence, and the decretal of Pope Boniface VIII was
universally construed as forbidding all dissection, and as
threatening excommunication against those practising it. Through
this sacred conventionalism Vesalius broke without fear; despite
ecclesiastical censure, great opposition in his own profession,
and popular fury, he studied his science by the only method that
could give useful results. No peril daunted him. To secure
material for his investigations, he haunted gibbets and
charnel-houses, braving the fires of the Inquisition and the virus
of the plague. First of all men he began to place the science of
human anatomy on its solid modern foundations--on careful
examination and observation of the human body: this was his first
great sin, and it was soon aggravated by one considered even greater.

Perhaps the most unfortunate thing that has ever been done
for Christianity is the tying it to forms of science which are
doomed and gradually sinking. Just as, in the time of Roger
Bacon, excellent men devoted all their energies to binding
Christianity to Aristotle; just as, in the time of Reuchlin and
Erasmus, they insisted on binding Christianity to Thomas Aquinas;
so, in the time of Vesalius, such men made every effort to link
Christianity to Galen. The cry has been the same in all ages; it
is the same which we hear in this age for curbing scientific
studies: the cry for what is called "sound learning." Whether
standing for Aristotle against Bacon, or for Aquinas against
Erasmus, or for Galen against Vesalius, the cry is always for
"sound learning": the idea always has been that the older
studies are" _safe_."

At twenty-eight years of age Vesalius gave to the world his great
work on human anatomy. With it ended the old and began the new;
its researches, by their thoroughness, were a triumph of science;
its illustrations, by their fidelity, were a triumph of art.

To shield himself, as far as possible, in the battle which
he foresaw must come, Vesalius dedicated the work to the Emperor
Charles V, and in his preface he argues for his method, and
against the parrot repetitions of the mediaeval text-books;
he also condemns the wretched anatomical preparations and
specimens made by physicians who utterly refused to advance
beyond the ancient master. the parrot-like repeaters of Galen
gave battle at once. After the manner of their time their first
missiles were epithets; and, the vast arsenal of these having been
exhausted, they began to use sharper weapons--weapons theologic.

In this case there were especial reasons why the theological
authorities felt called upon to intervene. First, there was the
old idea prevailing in the Church that the dissection of the
human body is forbidden to Christians: this was used with great
force against Vesalius, but he at first gained a temporary
victory; for, a conference of divines having been asked to decide
whether dissection of the human body is sacrilege, gave a
decision in the negative.

The reason was simple: the great Emperor Charles V had made
Vesalius his physician and could not spare him; but, on the
accession of Philip II to the throne of Spain and the
Netherlands, the whole scene changed. Vesalius now complained
that in Spain he could not obtain even a human skull for his
anatomical investigations: the medical and theological
reactionists had their way, and to all appearance they have, as a
rule, had it in Spain ever since. As late as the last years of
the eighteenth century an observant English traveller found that
there were no dissections before medical classes in the Spanish
universities, and that the doctrine of the circulation of the
blood was still denied, more than a century and a half after
Sarpi and Harvey had proved it.

Another theological idea barred the path of Vesalius.
Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that there exists in
man a bone imponderable, incorruptible, incombustible--the
necessary nucleus of the resurrection body. Belief in a
resurrection of the physical body, despite St. Paul's Epistle to
the Corinthians, had been incorporated into the formula evolved
during the early Christian centuries and known as the Apostles'
Creed, and was held throughout Christendom, "always, everywhere,
and by all." This hypothetical bone was therefore held in great
veneration, and many anatomists sought to discover it; but
Vesalius, revealing so much else, did not find it. He contented
himself with saying that he left the question regarding the existence
of such a bone to the theologians. He could not lie; he did not
wish to fight the Inquisition; and thus he fell under suspicion.

The strength of this theological point may be judged from
the fact that no less eminent a surgeon than Riolan consulted the
executioner to find out whether, when he burned a criminal, all
the parts were consumed; and only then was the answer received
which fatally undermined this superstition. Yet, in 1689 we find
it still lingering in France, stimulating opposition in the
Church to dissection. Even as late as the eighteenth century,
Bernouilli having shown that the living human body constantly
undergoes a series of changes, so that all its particles are
renewed in a given number of years, so much ill feeling was drawn
upon him, from theologians, who saw in this statement danger to
the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, that for the sake
of peace he struck out his argument on this subject from his
collected works.[[53]]

Still other enroachments upon the theological view were made
by the new school of anatomists, and especially by Vesalius.
During the Middle Ages there had been developed various
theological doctrines regarding the human body; these were based
upon arguments showing what the body, _ought to be_, and
naturally, when anatomical science showed what it _is_, these
doctrines fell. An example of such popular theological reasoning
is seen in a widespread belief of the twelfth century, that,
during the year in which the cross of Christ was captured by
Saladin, children, instead of having thirty or thirty-two teeth
as before, had twenty or twenty-two. So, too, in Vesalius's time
another doctrine of this sort was dominant: it had long been held
that Eve, having been made by the Almighty from a rib taken out
of Adam's side, there must be one rib fewer on one side of every
man than on the other. This creation of Eve was a favourite
subject with sculptors and painters, from Giotto, who carved it
upon his beautiful Campanile at Florence, to the illuminators of
missals, and even to those who illustrated Bibles and religious
books in the first years after the invention of printing; but
Vesalius and the anatomists who followed him put an end among
thoughtful men to this belief in the missing rib, and in doing
this dealt a blow at much else in the sacred theory. Naturally,
all these considerations brought the forces of ecclesiasticism
against the innovators in anatomy.[[54]]

A new weapon was now forged: Vesalius was charged with
dissecting a living man, and, either from direct persecution, as
the great majority of authors assert, or from indirect
influences, as the recent apologists for Philip II admit, he
became a wanderer: on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, apparently
undertaken to atone for his sin, he was shipwrecked, and in the
prime of his life and strength he was lost to the world.

And yet not lost. In this century a great painter has again
given him to us. By the magic of Hamann's pencil Vesalius again
stands on earth, and we look once more into his cell. Its windows
and doors, bolted and barred within, betoken the storm of
bigotry which rages without; the crucifix, toward which he turns
his eyes, symbolizes the spirit in which he labours; the corpse
of the plague-stricken beneath his hand ceases to be repulsive;
his very soul seems to send forth rays from the canvas, which
strengthen us for the good fight in this age.[[54b]]

His death was hastened, if not caused, by men who
conscientiously supposed that he was injuring religion: his poor,
blind foes aided in destroying one of religion's greatest
apostles. What was his influence on religion? He substituted, for
the repetition of worn-out theories, a conscientious and reverent
search into the works of the great Power giving life to the
universe; he substituted, for representations of the human
structure pitiful and unreal, representations revealing truths
most helpful to the whole human race.

The death of this champion seems to have virtually ended the
contest. Licenses to dissect soon began to be given by sundry
popes to universities, and were renewed at intervals of from
three to four years, until the Reformation set in motion trains
of thought which did much to release science from this yoke.[[55]]


    X. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO INOCULATION, VACCINATION,
                AND THE USE OF ANAESTHETICS.

I hasten now to one of the most singular struggles of
medical science during modern times. Early in the last century
Boyer presented inoculation as a preventive of smallpox in
France, and thoughtful physicians in England, inspired by Lady
Montagu and Maitland, followed his example. Ultra-conservatives
in medicine took fright at once on both sides of the Channel, and
theology was soon finding profound reasons against the new
practice. The French theologians of the Sorbonne solemnly
condemned it; the English theologians were most loudly
represented by the Rev. Edward Massey, who in 1772 preached and
published a sermon entitled _The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of
Inoculation_. In this he declared that Job's distemper was
probably confluent smallpox; that he had been inoculated
doubtless by the devil; that diseases are sent by Providence for
the punishment of sin; and that the proposed attempt to prevent
them is "a diabolical operation." Not less vigorous was the
sermon of the Rev. Mr. Delafaye, entitled _Inoculation an
Indefensible Practice_. This struggle went on for thirty years. It
is a pleasure to note some churchmen--and among them Madox,
Bishop of Worcester--giving battle on the side of right reason;
but as late as 1753 we have a noted rector at Canterbury
denouncing inoculation from his pulpit in the primatial city, and
many of his brethren following his example.

The same opposition was vigorous in Protestant Scotland. A
large body of ministers joined in denouncing the new practice as
"flying in the face of Providence," and "endeavouring to baffle a
Divine judgment."

On our own side of the ocean, also, this question had to be
fought out. About the year 1721 Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, a physician
in Boston, made an experiment in inoculation, one of his first
subjects being his own son. He at once encountered bitter
hostility, so that the selectmen of the city forbade him to
repeat the experiment. Foremost among his opponents was Dr.
Douglas, a Scotch physician, supported by the medical professton
and the newspapers. The violence of the opposing party knew no
bounds; they insisted that inoculation was "poisoning," and they
urged the authorities to try Dr. Boylston for murder. Having thus
settled his case for this world, they proceeded to settle it for
the next, insisting that "for a man to infect a family in the
morning with smallpox and to pray to God in the evening against
the disease is blasphemy"; that the smallpox is "a judgment of
God on the sins of the people," and that "to avert it is but to
provoke him more"; that inoculation is "an encroachment on the
prerogatives of Jehovah, whose right it is to wound and smite."
Among the mass of scriptural texts most remote from any possible
bearing on the subject one was employed which was equally cogent
against any use of healing means in any disease--the words of
Hosea: "He hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and
he will bind us up."

So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was
in danger; it was considered unsafe for him to be out of his
house in the evening; a lighted grenade was even thrown into the
house of Cotton Mather, who had favoured the new practice, and
had sheltered another clergyman who had submitted himself to it.

To the honour of the Puritan clergy of New England, it
should be said that many of them were Boylston's strongest
supporters. Increase and Cotton Mather had been among the first
to move in favour of inoculation, the latter having called
Boylston's attention to it; and at the very crisis of affairs six
of the leading clergymen of Boston threw their influence on
Boylston's side and shared the obloquy brought upon him. Although
the gainsayers were not slow to fling into the faces of the
Mathers their action regarding witchcraft, urging that their
credulity in that matter argued credulity in this, they
persevered, and among the many services rendered by the clergymen
of New England to their country this ought certainly to be
remembered; for these men had to withstand, shoulder to shoulder
with Boylston and Benjamin Franklin, the same weapons which were
hurled at the supporters of inoculation in Europe--charges of
"unfaithfulness to the revealed law of God."

The facts were soon very strong against the gainsayers:
within a year or two after the first experiment nearly three
hundred persons had been inoculated by Boylston in Boston and
neighbouring towns, and out of these only six had died; whereas,
during the same period, out of nearly six thousand persons who
had taken smallpox naturally, and had received only the usual
medical treatment, nearly one thousand had died. Yet even here
the gainsayers did not despair, and, when obliged to confess the
success of inoculation, they simply fell back upon a new
argument, and answered: "It was good that Satan should be
dispossessed of his habitation which he had taken up in men in
our Lord's day, but it was not lawful that the children of the
Pharisees should cast him out by the help of Beelzebub. We must
always have an eye to the matter of what we do as well as the
result, if we intend to keep a good conscience toward God." But
the facts were too strong; the new practice made its way in the
New World as in the Old, though bitter opposition continued, and
in no small degree on vague scriptural grounds, for more than
twenty years longer.[[57]]

The steady evolution of scientific medicine brings us next
to Jenner's discovery of vaccination. Here, too, sundry vague
survivals of theological ideas caused many of the clergy to side
with retrograde physicians. Perhaps the most virulent of Jenner's
enemies was one of his professional brethren, Dr. Moseley, who
placed on the title-page of his book, _Lues Bovilla_, the motto,
referring to Jenner and his followers, "Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do": this book of Dr. Moseley was
especially indorsed by the Bishop of Dromore. In 1798 an
Anti-vaccination Society was formed by physicians and clergymen,
who called on the people of Boston to suppress vaccination, as
"bidding defiance to Heaven itself, even to the will of God," and
declared that "the law of God prohibits the practice." As late as
1803 the Rev. Dr. Ramsden thundered against vaccination in a
sermon before the University of Cambridge, mingling texts of
Scripture with calumnies against Jenner; but Plumptre and the
Rev. Rowland Hill in England, Waterhouse in America, Thouret in
France, Sacco in Italy, and a host of other good men and true,
pressed forward, and at last science, humanity, and right reason
gained the victory. Most striking results quickly followed. The
diminution in the number of deaths from the terrible scourge was
amazing. In Berlin, during the eight years following 1783, over
four thousand children died of the smallpox; while during the
eight years following 1814, after vaccination had been largely
adopted, out of a larger number of deaths there were but five
hundred and thirty-five from this disease. In Wurtemberg, during
the twenty-four years following 1772, one in thirteen of all the
children died of smallpox, while during the eleven years after
1822 there died of it only one in sixteen hundred. In Copenhagen,
during twelve years before the introduction of vaccination,
fifty-five hundred persons died of smallpox, and during the
sixteen years after its introduction only one hundred and
fifty-eight persons died of it throughout all Denmark. In Vienna,
where the average yearly mortality from this disease had been
over eight hundred, it was steadily and rapidly reduced, until in
1803 it had fallen to less than thirty; and in London, formerly
so afflicted by this scourge, out of all her inhabitants there
died of it in 1890 but one. As to the world at large, the result
is summed up by one of the most honoured English physicians of
our time, in the declaration that "Jenner has saved, is now
saving, and will continue to save in all coming ages, more lives
in one generation than were destroyed in all the wars of Napoleon."

It will have been noticed by those who have read this history
thus far that the record of the Church generally was far more
honourable in this struggle than in many which preceded it:
the reason is not difficult to find; the decline of theology
enured to the advantage of religion, and religion gave powerful
aid to science.

Yet there have remained some survivals both in Protestantism
and in Catholicism which may be regarded with curiosity. A small
body of perversely ingenious minds in the medical profession in
England have found a few ardent allies among the less intellectual
clergy. The Rev. Mr. Rothery and the Rev. Mr. Allen, of the
Primitive Methodists, have for sundry vague theological reasons
especially distinguished themselves by opposition to compulsory
vaccination; but it is only just to say that the great body of
the English clergy have for a long time taken the better view.

Far more painful has been the recent history of the other great
branch of the Christian Church--a history developed where it might
have been least expected: the recent annals of the world hardly
present a more striking antithesis between Religion and Theology.

On the religious side few things in the history of the Roman
Church have been more beautiful than the conduct of its clergy in
Canada during the great outbreak of ship-fever among immigrants at
Montreal about the middle of the present century. Day and night
the Catholic priesthood of that city ministered fearlessly to
those victims of sanitary ignorance; fear of suffering and death
could not drive these ministers from their work; they laid down
their lives cheerfully while carrying comfort to the poorest and
most ignorant of our kind: such was the record of their religion.
But in 1885 a record was made by their theology. In that year the
smallpox broke out with great virulence in Montreal. The
Protestant population escaped almost entirely by vaccination; but
multitudes of their Catholic fellow-citizens, under some vague
survival of the old orthodox ideas, refused vaccination; and
suffered fearfully. When at last the plague became so serious
that travel and trade fell off greatly and quarantine began to be
established in neighbouring cities, an effort was made to enforce
compulsory vaccination. The result was, that large numbers of the
Catholic working population resisted and even threatened
bloodshed. The clergy at first tolerated and even encouraged this
conduct: the Abbe Filiatrault, priest of St. James's Church,
declared in a sermon that, "if we are afflicted with smallpox, it
is because we had a carnival last winter, feasting the flesh,
which has offended the Lord; it is to punish our pride that God
has sent us smallpox." The clerical press went further: the
_Etendard_ exhorted the faithful to take up arms rather than
submit to vaccination, and at least one of the secular papers was
forced to pander to the same sentiment. The Board of Health
struggled against this superstition, and addressed a circular to
the Catholic clergy, imploring them to recommend vaccination;
but, though two or three complied with this request, the great
majority were either silent or openly hostile. The Oblate
Fathers, whose church was situated in the very heart of the
infected district, continued to denounce vaccination; the
faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional exercises of various
sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy a great procession was
ordered with a solemn appeal to the Virgin, and the use of the
rosary was carefully specified.

Meantime, the disease, which had nearly died out among the
Protestants, raged with ever-increasing virulence among the
Catholics; and, the truth becoming more and more clear, even to
the most devout, proper measures were at last enforced and the
plague was stayed, though not until there had been a fearful
waste of life among these simple-hearted believers, and germs of
scepticism planted in the hearts of their children which will
bear fruit for generations to come.[[61]]

Another class of cases in which the theologic spirit has
allied itself with the retrograde party in medical science is
found in the history of certain remedial agents; and first may be
named cocaine. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century
the value of coca had been discovered in South America; the
natives of Peru prized it highly, and two eminent Jesuits, Joseph
Acosta and Antonio Julian, were converted to this view. But the
conservative spirit in the Church was too strong; in 1567 the
Second Council of Lima, consisting of bishops from all parts of
South America, condemned it, and two years later came a royal
decree declaring that "the notions entertained by the natives
regarding it are an illusion of the devil."

As a pendant to this singular mistake on the part of the
older Church came another committed by many Protestants. In the
early years of the seventeenth century the Jesuit missionaries in
South America learned from the natives the value of the so-called
Peruvian bark in the treatment of ague; and in 1638, the Countess
of Cinchon, Regent of Peru, having derived great benefit from the
new remedy, it was introduced into Europe. Although its alkaloid,
quinine, is perhaps the nearest approach to a medical specific,
and has diminished the death rate in certain regions to an
amazing extent, its introduction was bitterly opposed by many
conservative members of the medical profession, and in this
opposition large numbers of ultra-Protestants joined, out of
hostility to the Roman Church. In the heat of sectarian feeling
the new remedy was stigmatized as "an invention of the devil";
and so strong was this opposition that it was not introduced into
England until 1653, and even then its use was long held back,
owing mainly to anti-Catholic feeling.

What the theological method on the ultra-Protestant side
could do to help the world at this very time is seen in the fact
that, while this struggle was going on, Hoffmann was attempting
to give a scientific theory of the action of the devil in causing
Job's boils. This effort at a _quasi_-scientific explanation which
should satisfy the theological spirit, comical as it at first
seems, is really worthy of serious notice, because it must be
considered as the beginning of that inevitable effort at
compromise which we see in the history of every science when it
begins to appear triumphant.[[62]]

But I pass to a typical conflict in our days, and in a
Protestant country. In 1847, James Young Simpson, a Scotch
physician, who afterward rose to the highest eminence in his
profession, having advocated the use of anaesthetics in
obstetrical cases, was immediately met by a storm of opposition.
This hostility flowed from an ancient and time-honoured belief in
Scotland. As far back as the year 1591, Eufame Macalyane, a lady
of rank, being charged with seeking the aid of Agnes Sampson for
the relief of pain at the time of the birth of her two sons, was
burned alive on the Castle Hill of Edinburgh; and this old
theological view persisted even to the middle of the nineteenth
century. From pulpit after pulpit Simpson's use of chloroform was
denounced as impious and contrary to Holy Writ; texts were cited
abundantly, the ordinary declaration being that to use chloroform
was "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman." Simpson
wrote pamphlet after pamphlet to defend the blessing which he
brought into use; but he seemed about to be overcome, when he
seized a new weapon, probably the most absurd by which a great
cause was ever won: "My opponents forget," he said, "the
twenty-first verse of the second chapter of Genesis; it is the
record of the first surgical operation ever performed, and that
text proves that the Maker of the universe, before he took the
rib from Adam's side for the creation of Eve, caused a deep
sleep to fall upon Adam." This was a stunning blow, but it did
not entirely kill the opposition; they had strength left to
maintain that the "deep sleep of Adam took place before the
introduction of pain into the world--in a state of innocence."
But now a new champion intervened--Thomas Chalmers: with a few
pungent arguments from his pulpit he scattered the enemy forever,
and the greatest battle of science against suffering was won.
This victory was won not less for religion. Wisely did those who
raised the monument at Boston to one of the discoverers of
anaesthetics inscribe upon its pedestal the words from our sacred
text, "This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is
wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working."[[63]]


    XI. FINAL BREAKING AWAY OF THE THEOLOGICAL THEORY IN MEDICINE.

While this development of history was going on, the central
idea on which the whole theologic view rested--the idea of
diseases as resulting from the wrath of God or malice of
Satan--was steadily weakened; and, out of the many things which
show this, one may be selected as indicating the drift of thought
among theologians themselves.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century the most eminent
divines of the American branch of the Anglican Church framed
their _Book of Common Prayer_. Abounding as it does in evidences
of their wisdom and piety, few things are more noteworthy than a
change made in the exhortation to the faithful to present
themselves at the communion. While, in the old form laid down in
the English _Prayer Book_, the minister was required to warn his
flock not "to kindle God's wrath" or "provoke him to plague us
with divers diseases and sundry kinds of death," from the
American form all this and more of similar import in various
services was left out.

Since that day progress in medical science has been rapid
indeed, and at no period more so than during the last half of the
nineteenth century.

The theological view of disease has steadily faded, and the
theological hold upon medical education has been almost entirely
relaxed. In three great fields, especially, discoveries have been
made which have done much to disperse the atmosphere of miracle.
First, there has come knowledge regarding the relation between
imagination and medicine, which, though still defective, is of
great importance. This relation has been noted during the whole
history of the science. When the soldiers of the Prince of
Orange, at the siege of Breda in 1625, were dying of scurvy by
scores, he sent to the physicians "two or three small vials
filled with a decoction of camomile, wormwood, and camphor, gave
out that it was a very rare and precious medicine--a medicine of
such virtue that two or three drops sufficed to impregnate a
gallon of water, and that it had been obtained from the East with
great difficulty and danger." This statement, made with much
solemnity, deeply impressed the soldiers; they took the medicine
eagerly, and great numbers recovered rapidly. Again, two
centuries later, young Humphry Davy, being employed to apply the
bulb of the thermometer to the tongues of certain patients at
Bristol after they had inhaled various gases as remedies for
disease, and finding that the patients supposed this application
of the thermometer-bulb was the cure, finally wrought cures by
this application alone, without any use of the gases whatever.
Innumerable cases of this sort have thrown a flood of light upon
such cures as those wrought by Prince Hohenlohe, by the "metallic
tractors," and by a multitude of other agencies temporarily in
vogue, but, above all, upon the miraculous cures which in past
ages have been so frequent and of which a few survive.

The second department is that of hypnotism. Within the last
half-century many scattered indications have been collected and
supplemented by thoughtful, patient investigators of genius, and
especially by Braid in England and Charcot in France. Here, too,
great inroads have been made upon the province hitherto sacred to
miracle, and in 1888 the cathedral preacher, Steigenberger, of
Augsburg, sounded an alarm. He declared his fears "lest
accredited Church miracles lose their hold upon the public,"
denounced hypnotism as a doctrine of demons, and ended with the
singular argument that, inasmuch as hypnotism is avowedly
incapable of explaining all the wonders of history, it is idle to
consider it at all. But investigations in hypnotism still go on,
and may do much in the twentieth century to carry the world yet
further from the realm of the miraculous.

In a third field science has won a striking series of
victories. Bacteriology, beginning in the researches of
Leeuwenhoek in the seventeenth century, continued by O. F. Muller
in the eighteenth, and developed or applied with wonderful skill
by Ehrenberg, Cohn, Lister, Pasteur, Koch, Billings, Bering, and
their compeers in the nineteenth, has explained the origin and
proposed the prevention or cure of various diseases widely
prevailing, which until recently have been generally held to be
"inscrutable providences." Finally, the closer study of
psychology, especially in its relations to folklore, has revealed
processes involved in the development of myths and legends: the
phenomena of "expectant attention," the tendency to
marvel-mongering, and the feeling of "joy in believing."

In summing up the history of this long struggle between
science and theology, two main facts are to be noted: First, that
in proportion as the world approached the "ages of faith" it
receded from ascertained truth, and in proportion as the world
has receded from the "ages of faith" it has approached
ascertained truth; secondly, that, in proportion as the grasp of
theology Upon education tightened, medicine declined, and in
proportion as that grasp has relaxed, medicine has been developed.

The world is hardly beyond the beginning of medical
discoveries, yet they have already taken from theology what was
formerly its strongest province--sweeping away from this vast
field of human effort that belief in miracles which for more than
twenty centuries has been the main stumblingblock in the path of
medicine; and in doing this they have cleared higher paths not
only for science, but for religion.[[66]]


                              CHAPTER XIV.
                        FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE.

        I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION.

A VERY striking feature in recorded history has been the
recurrence of great pestilences. Various indications in ancient
times show their frequency, while the famous description of the
plague of Athens given by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by
Lucretius, exemplify their severity. In the Middle Ages they
raged from time to time throughout Europe: such plagues as the
Black Death and the sweating sickness swept off vast multitudes,
the best authorities estimating that of the former, at the middle
of the fourteenth century, more than half the population of
England died, and that twenty-five millions of people perished in
various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven thousand patients
died of the plague at Paris alone, and in 1580 more than twenty
thousand. The great plague in England and other parts of Europe
in the seventeenth century was also fearful, and that which swept
the south of Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century,
as well as the invasions by the cholera at various times during
the nineteenth, while less terrible than those of former years,
have left a deep impress upon the imaginations of men.

From the earliest records we find such pestilences attributed
to the wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had been the
prevailing view even in the most cultured ages before the
establishment of Christianity: in Greece and Rome especially,
plagues of various sorts were attributed to the wrath of the
gods; in Judea, the scriptural records of various plagues sent
upon the earth by the Divine fiat as a punishment for sin show
the continuance of this mode of thought. Among many examples
and intimations of this in our sacred literature, we have the
epidemic which carried off fourteen thousand seven hundred of the
children of Israel, and which was only stayed by the prayers and
offerings of Aaron, the high priest; the destruction of seventy
thousand men in the pestilence by which King David was punished
for the numbering of Israel, and which was only stopped when the
wrath of Jahveh was averted by burnt-offerings; the plague
threatened by the prophet Zechariah, and that delineated in the
Apocalypse. From these sources this current of ideas was poured
into the early Christian Church, and hence it has been that
during nearly twenty centuries since the rise of Christianity,
and down to a period within living memory, at the appearance of
any pestilence the Church authorities, instead of devising
sanitary measures, have very generally preached the necessity of
immediate atonement for offences against the Almighty.

This view of the early Church was enriched greatly by a new
development of theological thought regarding the powers of Satan
and evil angels, the declaration of St. Paul that the gods of
antiquity were devils being cited as its sufficient warrant.[[68]]

Moreover, comets, falling stars, and earthquakes were
thought, upon scriptural authority, to be "signs and wonders"--
evidences of the Divine wrath, heralds of fearful visitations;
and this belief, acting powerfully upon the minds of millions,
did much to create a panic-terror sure to increase epidemic
disease wherever it broke forth.

The main cause of this immense sacrifice of life is now
known to have been the want of hygienic precaution, both in the
Eastern centres, where various plagues were developed, and in the
European towns through which they spread. And here certain
theological reasonings came in to resist the evolution of a
proper sanitary theory. Out of the Orient had been poured into
the thinking of western Europe the theological idea that the
abasement of man adds to the glory of God; that indignity to the
body may secure salvation to the soul; hence, that cleanliness
betokens pride and filthiness humility. Living in filth was
regarded by great numbers of holy men, who set an example to the
Church and to society, as an evidence of sanctity. St. Jerome and
the Breviary of the Roman Church dwell with unction on the fact
that St. Hilarion lived his whole life long in utter physical
uncleanliness; St. Athanasius glorifies St. Anthony because he
had never washed his feet; St. Abraham's most striking evidence
of holiness was that for fifty years he washed neither his hands
nor his feet; St. Sylvia never washed any part of her body save
her fingers; St. Euphraxia belonged to a convent in which the
nuns religiously abstained from bathing. St. Mary of Egypt was
emninent for filthiness; St. Simnon Stylites was in this respect
unspeakable--the least that can be said is, that he lived in
ordure and stench intolerable to his visitors. The _Lives of the
Saints_ dwell with complacency on the statement that, when sundry
Eastern monks showed a disposition to wash themselves, the
Almighty manifested his displeasure by drying up a neighbouring
stream until the bath which it had supplied was destroyed.

The religious world was far indeed from the inspired utterance
attributed to John Wesley, that "cleanliness is near akin
to godliness." For century after century the idea prevailed
that filthiness was akin to holiness; and, while we may well
believe that the devotion of the clergy to the sick was one cause
why, during the greater plagues, they lost so large a proportion
of their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion that their
want of cleanliness had much to do with it. In France, during the
fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of his
time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered
especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy.
During the Black Death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks
fell victims in one group of buildings.

Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of
thought exercised great influence throughout society, and all the
more because it justified the carelessness and sloth to which
ordinary humanity is prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as
well as in the country at large, down to a recent period, the
most ordinary sanitary precautions were neglected, and
pestilences continued to be attributed to the wrath of God or the
malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and powerful
impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the end of
the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was
elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful
pestilence: the people were dying by thousands; out of one
procession imploring the mercy of Heaven no less than eighty
persons died within an hour: what the heathen in an earlier epoch
had attributed to Apollo was now attributed to Jehovah, and
chroniclers tell us that fiery darts were seen flung from heaven
into the devoted city. But finally, in the midst of all this
horror, Gregory, at the head of a penitential procession, saw
hovering over the mausoleum of Hadrian the figure of the
archangel Michael, who was just sheathing a flaming sword, while
three angels were heard chanting the Regina Coeli. The legend
continues that the Pope immediately broke forth into hallelujahs
for this sign that the plague was stayed, and, as it shortly
afterward became less severe, a chapel was built at the summit of
the mausoleum and dedicated to St. Michael; still later, above
the whole was erected the colossal statue of the archangel
sheathing his sword, which still stands to perpetuate the legend.
Thus the greatest of Rome's ancient funeral monuments was made to
bear testimony to this medieval belief; the mausoleum of Hadrian
became the castle of St. Angelo. A legend like this, claiming to
date from the greatest of the early popes, and vouched for by
such an imposing monument, had undoubtedly a marked effect upon
the dominant theology throughout Europe, which was constantly
developing a great body of thought regarding the agencies by
which the Divine wrath might be averted.

First among these agencies, naturally, were evidences of
devotion, especially gifts of land, money, or privileges to
churches, monasteries, and shrines--the seats of fetiches which
it was supposed had wrought cures or might work them. The whole
evolution of modern history, not only ecclesiastical but civil,
has been largely affected by the wealth transferred to the clergy
at such periods. It was noted that in the fourteenth century,
after the great plague, the Black Death, had passed, an immensely
increased proportion of the landed and personal property of every
European country was in the hands of the Church. Well did a great
ecclesiastic remark that "pestilences are the harvests of the
ministers of God."[[71]]

Other modes of propitiating the higher powers were
penitential processions, the parading of images of the Virgin or
of saints through plague-stricken towns, and fetiches
innumerable. Very noted in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were the processions of the flagellants, trooping
through various parts of Europe, scourging their naked bodies,
shrieking the penitential psalms, and often running from wild
excesses of devotion to the maddest orgies.

Sometimes, too, plagues were attributed to the wrath of
lesser heavenly powers. Just as, in former times, the fury of
"far-darting Apollo" was felt when his name was not respectfully
treated by mortals, so, in 1680, the Church authorities at Rome
discovered that the plague then raging resulted from the anger of
St. Sebastian because no monument had been erected to him. Such a
monument was therefore placed in the Church of St. Peter ad
Vincula, and the plague ceased.

So much for the endeavour to avert the wrath of the heavenly
powers. On the other hand, theological reasoning no less subtle
was used in thwarting the malice of Satan. This idea, too, came
from far. In the sacred books of India and Persia, as well as in
our own, we find the same theory of disease, leading to similar
means of cure. Perhaps the most astounding among Christian
survivals of this theory and its resultant practices was seen
during the plague at Rome in 1522. In that year, at that centre
of divine illumination, certain people, having reasoned upon the
matter, came to the conclusion that this great scourge was the
result of Satanic malice; and, in view of St. Paul's declaration
that the ancient gods were devils, and of the theory that the
ancient gods of Rome were the devils who had the most reason to
punish that city for their dethronement, and that the great
amphitheatre was the chosen haunt of these demon gods, an ox
decorated with garlands, after the ancient heathen manner, was
taken in procession to the Colosseum and solemnly sacrificed.
Even this proved vain, and the Church authorities then ordered
expiatory processions and ceremonies to propitiate the Almighty,
the Virgin, and the saints, who had been offended by this
temporary effort to bribe their enemies.

But this sort of theological reasoning developed an idea far
more disastrous, and this was that Satan, in causing pestilences,
used as his emissaries especially Jews and witches. The proof of
this belief in the case of the Jews was seen in the fact that
they escaped with a less percentage of disease than did the
Christians in the great plague periods. This was doubtless due in
some measure to their remarkable sanitary system, which had
probably originated thousands of years before in Egypt, and had
been handed down through Jewish lawgivers and statesmen.
Certainly they observed more careful sanitary rules and more
constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among
Christians; but the public at large could not understand so
simple a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity
resulted from protection by Satan, and that this protection was
repaid and the pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of
Christians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were
made in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to
thwart Satan, and to stop the plague by torturing and murdering
the Jews. Throughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of
extensive burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the
time of the Black Death, it is computed that twelve thousand
Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is
said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee
remains as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for
poisoning the wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal
castle of Chinon, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled
with blazing wood, and in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews
were burned. Everywhere in continental Europe this mad
persecution went on; but it is a pleasure to say that one great
churchman, Pope Clement VI, stood against this popular unreason,
and, so far as he could bring his influence to bear on the
maddened populace, exercised it in favour of mercy to these
supposed enemies of the Almighty.[[73]]

Yet, as late as 1527, the people of Pavia, being threatened
with plague, appealed to St. Bernardino of Feltro, who during his
life had been a fierce enemy of the Jews, and they passed a
decree promising that if the saint would avert the pestilence they
would expel the Jews from the city. The saint apparently accepted
the bargain, and in due time the Jews were expelled.

As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of
pestilence also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured
mainly from Oriental sources into our sacred books and thence
into the early Church, and was strengthened by a whole line of
Church authorities, fathers, doctors, and saints; but, above all,
by the great bull, _Summis Desiderantes_, issued by Pope Innocent
VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St. Peter
infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches are a
great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which afflict
humanity; and the Scripture on which the action recommended
against witches in this papal bull, as well as in so many sermons
and treatises for centuries afterward, was based, was the famous
text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." This idea
persisted long, and the evolution of it is among the most fearful
things in human history.[[74]]

In Germany its development was especially terrible. From the
middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth,
Catholic and Protestant theologians and ecclesiastics vied with
each other in detecting witches guilty of producing sickness or
bad weather; women were sent to torture and death by thousands,
and with them, from time to time, men and children. On the
Catholic side sufficient warrant for this work was found in the
bull of Pope Innocent VIII, and the bishops' palaces of south
Germany became shambles,--the lordly prelates of Salzburg,
Wurzburg, and Bamberg taking the lead in this butchery.

In north Germany Protestantism was just as conscientiously
cruel. It based its theory and practice toward witches directly
upon the Bible, and above all on the great text which has cost
the lives of so many myriads of innocent men, women, and
children, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Naturally the
Protestant authorities strove to show that Protestantism was no
less orthodox in this respect than Catholicism; and such
theological jurists as Carpzov, Damhouder, and Calov did their
work thoroughly. An eminent authority on this subject estimates
the number of victims thus sacrificed during that century in
Germany alone at over a hundred thousand.

Among the methods of this witch activity especially credited
in central and southern Europe was the anointing of city walls
and pavements with a diabolical unguent causing pestilence. In
1530 Michael Caddo was executed with fearful tortures for thus
besmearing the pavements of Geneva. But far more dreadful was the
torturing to death of a large body of people at Milan, in the
following century, for producing the plague by anointing the
walls; and a little later similar punishments for the same crime
were administered in Toulouse and other cities. The case in Milan
may be briefly summarized as showing the ideas on sanitary
science of all classes, from highest to lowest, in the
seventeenth century. That city was then under the control of
Spain; and, its authorities having received notice from the
Spanish Government that certain persons suspected of witchcraft
had recently left Madrid, and had perhaps gone to Milan to anoint
the walls, this communication was dwelt upon in the pulpits as
another evidence of that Satanic malice which the Church alone
had the means of resisting, and the people were thus excited and
put upon the alert. One morning, in the year 1630, an old woman,
looking out of her window, saw a man walking along the street and
wiping his fingers upon the walls; she immediately called the
attention of another old woman, and they agreed that this man
must be one of the diabolical anointers. It was perfectly evident
to a person under ordinary conditions that this unfortunate man
was simply trying to remove from his fingers the ink gathered
while writing from the ink-horn which he carried in his girdle;
but this explanation was too simple to satisfy those who first
observed him or those who afterward tried him: a mob was raised
and he was thrown into prison. Being tortured, he at first did
not know what to confess; but, on inquiring from the jailer and
others, he learned what the charge was, and, on being again
subjected to torture utterly beyond endurance, he confessed
everything which was suggested to him; and, on being tortured
again and again to give the names of his accomplices, he accused,
at hazard, the first people in the city whom he thought of.
These, being arrested and tortured beyond endurance, confessed
and implicated a still greater number, until members of the
foremost families were included in the charge. Again and again
all these unfortunates were tortured beyond endurance. Under
paganism, the rule regarding torture had been that it should not
be carried beyond human endurance; and we therefore find Cicero
ridiculing it as a means of detecting crime, because a stalwart
criminal of strong nerves might resist it and go free, while a
physically delicate man, though innocent, would be forced to
confess. Hence it was that under paganism a limit was imposed to
the torture which could be administered; but, when Christianity
had become predominant throughout Europe, torture was developed
with a cruelty never before known. There had been evolved a
doctrine of "excepted cases"--these "excepted cases" being
especially heresy and witchcraft; for by a very simple and
logical process of theological reasoning it was held that Satan
would give supernatural strength to his special devotees--that
is, to heretics and witches--and therefore that, in dealing with
them, there should be no limit to the torture. The result was in
this particular case, as in tens of thousands besides, that the
accused confessed everything which could be suggested to them,
and often in the delirium of their agony confessed far more than
all that the zeal of the prosecutors could suggest. Finally, a
great number of worthy people were sentenced to the most cruel
death which could be invented. The records of their trials and
deaths are frightful. The treatise which in recent years has
first brought to light in connected form an authentic account of
the proceedings in this affair, and which gives at the end
engravings of the accused subjected to horrible tortures on their
way to the stake and at the place of execution itself, is one of
the most fearful monuments of theological reasoning and human folly.

To cap the climax, after a poor apothecary had been tortured
into a confession that he had made the magic ointment, and when
he had been put to death with the most exquisite refinements of
torture, his family were obliged to take another name, and were
driven out from the city; his house was torn down, and on its
site was erected "The Column of Infamy," which remained on this
spot until, toward the end of the eighteenth century, a party of
young radicals, probably influenced by the reading of Beccaria,
sallied forth one night and leveled this pious monument to the ground.

Herein was seen the culmination and decline of the bull
_Summis Desiderantes_. It had been issued by him whom a majority
of the Christian world believes to be infallible in his teachings
to the Church as regards faith and morals; yet here was a
deliberate utterance in a matter of faith and morals which even
children now know to be utterly untrue. Though Beccaria's book on
_Crimes and Punishments_, with its declarations against torture,
was placed by the Church authorities upon the _Index_, and though
the faithful throughout the Christian world were forbidden to
read it, even this could not prevent the victory of truth over
this infallible utterance of Innocent VIII.[[78]]

As the seventeenth century went on, ingenuity in all parts
of Europe seemed devoted to new developments of fetichism. A very
curious monument of this evolution in Italy exists in the Royal
Gallery of Paintings at Naples, where may be seen several
pictures representing the measures taken to save the city from
the plague during the seventeenth century, but especially from
the plague of 1656. One enormous canvas gives a curious example
of the theological doctrine of intercession between man and his
Maker, spun out to its logical length. In the background is the
plague-stricken city: in the foreground the people are praying
to the city authorities to avert the plague; the city authorities
are praying to the Carthusian monks; the monks are praying to St.
Martin, St. Bruno, and St. Januarius; these three saints in their
turn are praying to the Virgin; the Virgin prays to Christ; and
Christ prays to the Almighty. Still another picture represents
the people, led by the priests, executing with horrible tortures
the Jews, heretics, and witches who were supposed to cause the
pestilence of 1656, while in the heavens the Virgin and St.
Januarius are interceding with Christ to sheathe his sword and
stop the plague.

In such an atmosphere of thought it is no wonder that the
death statistics were appalling. We hear of districts in which
not more than one in ten escaped, and some were entirely
depopulated. Such appeals to fetich against pestilence have
continued in Naples down to our own time, the great saving power
being the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. In 1856 the
present writer saw this miracle performed in the gorgeous chapel
of the saint forming part of the Cathedral of Naples. The chapel
was filled with devout worshippers of every class, from the
officials in court dress, representing the Bourbon king, down to
the lowest lazzaroni. The reliquary of silver-gilt, shaped like a
large human head, and supposed to contain the skull of the saint,
was first placed upon the altar; next, two vials containing a
dark substance said to be his blood, having been taken from the
wall, were also placed upon the altar near the head. As the
priests said masses, they turned the vials from time to time,
and the liquefaction being somewhat delayed, the great crowd of
people burst out into more and more impassioned expostulation and
petitions to the saint. Just in front of the altar were the
lazzaroni who claimed to be descendants of the saint's family,
and these were especially importunate: at such times they beg,
they scold, they even threaten; they have been known to abuse the
saint roundly, and to tell him that, if he did not care to show
his favour to the city by liquefying his blood, St. Cosmo and St.
Damian were just as good saints as he, and would no doubt be very
glad to have the city devote itself to them. At last, on the
occasion above referred to, the priest, turning the vials
suddenly, announced that the saint had performed the miracle,
and instantly priests, people, choir, and organ burst forth into
a great _Te Deum_; bells rang, and cannon roared; a procession was
formed, and the shrine containing the saint's relics was carried
through the streets, the people prostrating themselves on both
sides of the way and throwing showers of rose leaves upon the
shrine and upon the path before it. The contents of these
precious vials are an interesting relic indeed, for they
represent to us vividly that period when men who were willing to
go to the stake for their religious opinions thought it not wrong
to save the souls of their fellowmen by pious mendacity and
consecrated fraud. To the scientific eye this miracle is very
simple: the vials contain, no doubt, one of those mixtures fusing
at low-temperature, which, while kept in its place within the
cold stone walls of the church, remains solid, but upon being
brought out into the hot, crowded chapel, and fondled by the warm
hands of the priests, gradually softens and becomes liquid. It
was curious to note, at the time above mentioned, that even the
high functionaries representing the king looked at the miracle
with awe: they evidently found "joy in believing," and one of
them assured the present writer that the only thing which _could_
cause it was the direct exercise of miraculous power.

It may be reassuring to persons contemplating a visit to
that beautiful capital in these days, that, while this miracle
still goes on, it is no longer the only thing relied upon to
preserve the public health. An unbelieving generation, especially
taught by the recent horrors of the cholera, has thought it wise
to supplement the power of St. Januarius by the "Risanamento,"
begun mainly in 1885 and still going on. The drainage of the city
has thus been greatly improved, the old wells closed, and pure
water introduced from the mountains. Moreover, at the last
outburst of cholera a few years since, a noble deed was done
which by its moral effect exercised a widespread healing power.
Upon hearing of this terrific outbreak of pestilence, King
Humbert, though under the ban of the Church, broke from all the
entreaties of his friends and family, went directly into the
plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets, public places,
and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the sick and
dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the
pestilence. To the credit of the Church it should also be said
that the Cardinal Archbishop San Felice joined him in this.

Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king
seems to have surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for
it gave confidence and courage which very soon showed their
effects in diminishing the number of deaths. It would certainly
appear that in this matter the king was more directly under
Divine inspiration and guidance than was the Pope; for the fact
that King Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his life, while
Leo XIII remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed the Italian
people in favour of the new _regime_ and against the old as
nothing else could have done.

In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the
new Italian government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially
Rome, which under the sway of the popes was scandalously filthy,
are now among the cleanest cities in Europe. What the relics of
St. Januarius, St. Anthony, and a multitude of local fetiches
throughout Italy were for ages utterly unable to do, has been
accomplished by the development of the simplest sanitary principles.

Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where
theological considerations have been all-controlling for
centuries. Down to the interference of Napoleon with that
kingdom, all sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not
impious. The most sober accounts of travellers in the Spanish
Peninsula until a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic
in their pictures of peoples insisting on maintaining
arrangements more filthy than any which would be permitted in
an American backwoods camp, while taking enormous pains to stop
pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed
upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has
begun to work for good. The outbreaks of cholera in recent years
have done some little to bring in better sanitary measures.[[81]]


    II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.

We have seen how powerful in various nations especially
obedient to theology were the forces working in opposition to the
evolution of hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition,
less effective, it is true, but still acting with great power, in
countries which had become somewhat emancipated from theological
control. In England, during the medieval period, persecutions of
Jews were occasionally resorted to, and here and there we hear of
persecutions of witches; but, as torture was rarely used in
England, there were, from those charged with producing plague,
few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries
gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life
in England was such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting
organic material was allowed to accumulate and become a part of
the earthen floors of rural dwellings; and this undoubtedly
developed the germs of many diseases. In his noted letter to the
physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes the filth thus
incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what is of
far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the
wasting diseases of the period. He says, "If I entered into a
chamber which had been uninhabited for months, I was immediately
seized with a fever." He ascribed the fearful plague of the
sweating sickness to this cause. So, too, the noted Dr. Caius
advised sanitary precautions against the plague, and in
after-generations, Mead, Pringle, and others urged them; but the
prevailing thought was too strong, and little was done. Even the
floor of the presence chamber of Queen Elizabeth in Greenwich
Palace was "covered with hay, after the English fashion," as one
of the chroniclers tells us.

In the seventeenth century, aid in these great scourges was
mainly sought in special church services. The foremost English
churchmen during that century being greatly given to study of the
early fathers of the Church; the theological theory of disease,
so dear to the fathers, still held sway, and this was the case
when the various visitations reached their climax in the great
plague of London in 1665, which swept off more than a hundred
thousand people from that city. The attempts at meeting it by
sanitary measures were few and poor; the medical system of the
time was still largely tinctured by superstitions resulting from
medieval modes of thought; hence that plague was generally
attributed to the Divine wrath caused by "the prophaning of the
Sabbath." Texts from Numbers, the Psalms, Zechariah, and the
Apocalypse were dwelt upon in the pulpits to show that plagues
are sent by the Almighty to punish sin; and perhaps the most
ghastly figure among all those fearful scenes described by De Foe
is that of the naked fanatic walking up and down the streets with
a pan of fiery coals upon his head, and, after the manner of
Jonah at Nineveh, proclaiming woe to the city, and its
destruction in forty days.

That sin caused this plague is certain, but it was sanitary
sin. Both before and after this culmination of the disease cases
of plague were constantly occurring in London throughout the
seventeenth century; but about the beginning of the eighteenth
century it began to disappear. The great fire had done a good
work by sweeping off many causes and centres of infection, and
there had come wider streets, better pavements, and improved
water supply; so that, with the disappearance of the plague,
other diseases, especially dysenteries, which had formerly raged
in the city, became much less frequent.

But, while these epidemics were thus checked in London,
others developed by sanitary ignorance raged fearfully both there
and elsewhere, and of these perhaps the most fearful was the jail
fever. The prisons of that period were vile beyond belief. Men
were confined in dungeons rarely if ever disinfected after the
death of previous occupants, and on corridors connecting directly
with the foulest sewers: there was no proper disinfection,
ventilation, or drainage; hence in most of the large prisons for
criminals or debtors the jail fever was supreme, and from these
centres it frequently spread through the adjacent towns. This was
especially the case during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. In the Black Assize at Oxford, in 1577, the chief
baron, the sheriff, and about three hundred men died within forty
hours. Lord Bacon declared the jail fever "the most pernicious
infection next to the plague." In 1730, at the Dorsetshire
Assize, the chief baron and many lawyers were killed by it. The
High Sheriff of Somerset also took the disease and died. A single
Scotch regiment, being infected from some prisoners, lost no less
than two hundred. In 1750 the disease was so virulent at Newgate,
in the heart of London, that two judges, the lord mayor, sundry
aldermen, and many others, died of it.

It is worth noting that, while efforts at sanitary dealing
with this state of things were few, the theological spirit
developed a new and special form of prayer for the sufferers and
placed it in the Irish _Prayer Book_.

These forms of prayer seem to have been the main reliance
through the first half of the eighteenth century. But about 1750
began the work of John Howard, who visited the prisons of
England, made known their condition to the world, and never
rested until they were greatly improved. Then he applied the same
benevolent activity to prisons in other countries, in the far
East, and in southern Europe, and finally laid down his life, a
victim to disease contracted on one of his missions of mercy; but
the hygienic reforms he began were developed more and more until
this fearful blot upon modern civilization was removed.[[84]]

The same thing was seen in the Protestant colonies of
America; but here, while plagues were steadily attributed to
Divine wrath or Satanic malice, there was one case in which it
was claimed that such a visitation was due to the Divine mercy.
The pestilence among the _Indians_, before the arrival of the
Plymouth Colony, was attributed in a notable work of that period
to the Divine purpose of clearing New England for the heralds of
the gospel; on the other hand, the plagues which destroyed the
_white_ population were attributed by the same authority to devils
and witches. In Cotton Mather's _Wonder of the Invisible World_,
published at Boston in 1693, we have striking examples of this.
The great Puritan divine tells us:

"Plagues are some of those woes, with which the Divil
troubles us. It is said of the Israelites, in 1 Cor. 10. 10.
_They were destroyed of the destroyer_. That is, they had the
Plague among them. 'Tis the Destroyer, or the Divil, that
scatters Plagues about the World: Pestilential and Contagious
Diseases, 'tis the Divel, who do's oftentimes Invade us with
them. 'Tis no uneasy thing, for the Divel, to impregnate the Air
about us, with such Malignant Salts, as meeting with the Salt of
our Microcosm, shall immediately cast us into that Fermentation
and Putrefaction, which will utterly dissolve All the Vital Tyes
within us; Ev'n as an Aqua Fortis, made with a conjuuction of
Nitre and Vitriol, Corrodes what it Siezes upon. And when the
Divel has raised those Arsenical Fumes, which become Venomous.
Quivers full of Terrible Arrows, how easily can he shoot the
deleterious Miasms into those Juices or Bowels of Men's Bodies,
which will soon Enflame them with a Mortal Fire! Hence come such
Plagues, as that Beesome of Destruction which within our memory
swept away such a throng of people from one English City in one
Visitation: and hence those Infectious Feavers, which are but so
many Disguised Plagues among us, Causing Epidemical Desolations."

Mather gives several instances of witches causing diseases,
and speaks of "some long Bow'd down under such a Spirit of
Infirmity" being "Marvelously Recovered upon the Death of the
Witches," of which he gives an instance. He also cites a case
where a patient "was brought unto death's door and so remained
until the witch was taken and carried away by the constable, when
he began at once to recover and was soon well."[[86]]

In France we see, during generation after generation, a
similar history evolved; pestilence after pestilence came, and
was met by various fetiches. Noteworthy is the plague at
Marseilles near the beginning of the last century. The chronicles
of its sway are ghastly. They speak of great heaps of the
unburied dead in the public places, "forming pestilential
volcanoes"; of plague-stricken men and women in delirium
wandering naked through the streets; of churches and shrines
thronged with great crowds shrieking for mercy; of other crowds
flinging themselves into the wildest debauchery; of robber bands
assassinating the dying and plundering the dead; of three
thousand neglected children collected in one hospital and then
left to die; and of the death-roll numbering at last fifty
thousand out of a population of less than ninety thousand.

In the midst of these fearful scenes stood a body of men and
women worthy to be held in eternal honour--the physicians from
Paris and Montpellier; the mayor of the city, and one or two of
his associates; but, above all, the Chevalier Roze and Bishop
Belzunce. The history of these men may well make us glory in
human nature; but in all this noble group the figure of Belzunce
is the most striking. Nobly and firmly, when so many others even
among the regular and secular ecclesiastics fled, he stood by his
flock: day and night he was at work in the hospitals, cheering
the living, comforting the dying, and doing what was possible for
the decent disposal of the dead. In him were united the, two
great antagonistic currents of religion and of theology. As a
theologian he organized processions and expiatory services,
which, it must be confessed, rather increased the disease than
diminished it; moreover, he accepted that wild dream of a
hysterical nun--the worship of the material, physical sacred
heart of Jesus--and was one of the first to consecrate his diocese
to it; but, on the other hand, the religious spirit gave in him
one of its most beautiful manifestations in that or any other
century; justly have the people of Marseilles placed his statue
in the midst of their city in an attitude of prayer and blessing.

In every part of Europe and America, down to a recent
period, we find pestilences resulting from carelessness or
superstition still called "inscrutable providences." As late as
the end of the eighteenth century, when great epidemics made
fearful havoc in Austria, the main means against them seem to
have been grovelling before the image of St. Sebastian and
calling in special "witch-doctors"--that is, monks who cast out
devils. To seek the aid of physicians was, in the neighbourhood
of these monastic centres, very generally considered impious, and
the enormous death rate in such neighbourhoods was only
diminished in the present century, when scientific hygiene began
to make its way.

The old view of pestilence had also its full course in
Calvinistic Scotland; the only difference being that, while in
Roman Catholic countries relief was sought by fetiches, gifts,
processions, exorcisms, burnings of witches, and other works of
expiation, promoted by priests; in Scotland, after the
Reformation, it was sought in fast-days and executions of witches
promoted by Protestant elders. Accounts of the filthiness of
Scotch cities and villages, down to a period well within this
century, seem monstrous. All that in these days is swept into the
sewers was in those allowed to remain around the houses or
thrown into the streets. The old theological theory, that "vain
is the help of man," checked scientific thought and paralyzed
sanitary endeavour. The result was natural: between the
thirteenth and seventeenth centuries thirty notable epidemics
swept the country, and some of them carried off multitudes; but
as a rule these never suggested sanitary improvement; they were
called "visitations," attributed to Divine wrath against human
sin, and the work of the authorities was to announce the
particular sin concerned and to declaim against it. Amazing
theories were thus propounded--theories which led to spasms of
severity; and, in some of these, offences generally punished much
less severely were visited with death. Every pulpit interpreted
the ways of God to man in such seasons so as rather to increase
than to diminish the pestilence. The effect of thus seeking
supernatural causes rather than natural may be seen in such
facts as the death by plague of one fourth of the whole
population of the city of Perth in a single year of the fifteenth
century, other towns suffering similarly both then and afterward.

Here and there, physicians more wisely inspired endeavoured
to push sanitary measures, and in 1585 attempts were made to
clean the streets of Edinburgh; but the chroniclers tell us that
"the magistrates and ministers gave no heed." One sort of
calamity, indeed, came in as a mercy--the great fires which swept
through the cities, clearing and cleaning them. Though the town
council of Edinburgh declared the noted fire of 1700 "a fearful
rebuke of God," it was observed that, after it had done its work,
disease and death were greatly diminished.[[88]]


           III. THE TRIUMPH OF SANITARY SCIENCE.

But by those standing in the higher places of thought some
glimpses of scientific truth had already been obtained, and
attempts at compromise between theology and science in this field
began to be made, not only by ecclesiastics, but first of all, as
far back as the seventeenth century, by a man of science eminent
both for attainments and character--Robert Boyle. Inspired by the
discoveries in other fields, which had swept away so much of
theological thought, he could no longer resist the conviction
that some epidemics are due--in his own words--"to a tragical
concourse of natural causes"; but he argued that some of these
may be the result of Divine interpositions provoked by human
sins. As time went on, great difficulties showed themselves in
the way of this compromise--difficulties theological not less
than difficulties scientific. To a Catholic it was more and more
hard to explain the theological grounds why so many orthodox
cities, firm in the faith, were punished, and so many heretical
cities spared; and why, in regions devoted to the Church, the
poorer people, whose faith in theological fetiches was
unquestioning, died in times of pestilence like flies, while
sceptics so frequently escaped. Difficulties of the same sort
beset devoted Protestants; they, too, might well ask why it was
that the devout peasantry in their humble cottages perished,
while so much larger a proportion of the more sceptical upper
classes were untouched. Gradually it dawned both upon Catholic
and Protestant countries that, if any sin be punished by
pestilence, it is the sin of filthiness; more and more it began
to be seen by thinking men of both religions that Wesley's great
dictum stated even less than the truth; that not only was
"cleanliness akin to godliness," but that, as a means of keeping
off pestilence, it was far superior to godliness as godliness was
then generally understood.[[89]]

The recent history of sanitation in all civilized countries
shows triumphs which might well fill us with wonder, did there
not rise within us a far greater wonder that they were so long
delayed. Amazing is it to see how near the world has come again
and again to discovering the key to the cause and cure of
pestilence. It is now a matter of the simplest elementary
knowledge that some of the worst epidemics are conveyed in water.
But this fact seems to have been discovered many times in human
history. In the Peloponnesian war the Athenians asserted that
their enemies had poisoned their cisterns; in the Middle Ages the
people generally declared that the Jews had poisoned their wells;
and as late as the cholera of 1832 the Parisian mob insisted that
the water-carriers who distributed water for drinking purposes
from the Seine, polluted as it was by sewage, had poisoned it,
and in some cases murdered them on this charge: so far did this
feeling go that locked covers were sometimes placed upon the
water-buckets. Had not such men as Roger Bacon and his long line
of successors been thwarted by theological authority,--had not
such men as Thomas Aquinas, Vincent of Beauvais, and Albert the
Great been drawn or driven from the paths of science into the
dark, tortuous paths of theology, leading no whither,--the world
to-day, at the end of the nineteenth century, would have arrived
at the solution of great problems and the enjoyment of great
results which will only be reached at the end of the twentieth
century, and even in generations more remote. Diseases like
typhoid fever, influenza and pulmonary consumption, scarlet
fever, diphtheria, pneumonia, and _la grippe_, which now carry off
so many most precious lives, would have long since ceased to
scourge the world.

Still, there is one cause for satisfaction: the law
governing the relation of theology to disease is now well before
the world, and it is seen in the fact that, just in proportion as
the world progressed from the sway of Hippocrates to that of the
ages of faith, so it progressed in the frequency and severity of
great pestilences; and that, on the other hand, just in
proportion as the world has receded from that period when
theology was all-pervading and all-controlling, plague after
plague has disappeared, and those remaining have become less and
less frequent and virulent.[[90]]

The recent history of hygiene in all countries shows a long
series of victories, and these may well be studied in Great
Britain and the United States. In the former, though there had
been many warnings from eminent physicians, and above all in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from men like Caius, Mead,
and Pringle, the result was far short of what might have been
gained; and it was only in the year 1838 that a systematic
sanitary effort was begun in England by the public authorities.
The state of things at that time, though by comparison with the
Middle Ages happy, was, by comparison with what has since been
gained, fearful: the death rate among all classes was high, but
among the poor it was ghastly. Out of seventy-seven thousand
paupers in London during the years 1837 and 1838, fourteen
thousand were suffering from fever, and of these nearly six
thousand from typhus. In many other parts of the British Islands
the sanitary condition was no better. A noble body of men
grappled with the problem, and in a few years one of these rose
above his fellows--the late Edwin Chadwick. The opposition to his
work was bitter, and, though many churchmen aided him, the
support given by theologians and ecclesiastics as a whole was
very far short of what it should have been. Too many of them were
occupied in that most costly and most worthless of all
processes, "the saving of souls" by the inculcation of dogma. Yet
some of the higher ecclesiastics and many of the lesser clergy
did much, sometimes risking their lives, and one of them, Sidney
Godolphin Osborne, deserves lasting memory for his struggle to
make known the sanitary wants of the peasantry.

Chadwick began to be widely known in 1848 as a member of the
Board of Health, and was driven out for a time for overzeal; but
from one point or another, during forty years, he fought the
opposition, developed the new work, and one of the best exhibits
of its results is shown in his address before the Sanitary
Conference at Brighton in 1888. From this and other perfectly
trustworthy sources some idea may be gained of the triumph of the
scientific over the theological method of dealing with disease,
whether epidemic or sporadic.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century the annual
mortality of London is estimated at not less than eighty in a
thousand; about the middle of this century it stood at
twenty-four in a thousand; in 1889 it stood at less than eighteen
in a thousand; and in many parts the most recent statistics show
that it has been brought down to fourteen or fifteen in a
thousand. A quarter of a century ago the death rate from disease
in the Royal Guards at London was twenty in a thousand; in 1888
it had been reduced to six in a thousand. In the army generally
it had been seventeen in a thousand, but it has been reduced
until it now stands at eight. In the old Indian army it had been
sixty-nine in a thousand, but of late it has been brought down
first to twenty, and finally to fourteen. Mr. Chadwick in his
speech proved that much more might be done, for he called
attention to the German army, where the death rate from disease
has been reduced to between five and six in a thousand. The
Public Health Act having been passed in 1875, the death rate in
England among men fell, between 1871 and 1880, more than four in
a thousand, and among women more than six in a thousand. In the
decade between 1851 and 1860 there died of diseases attributable
to defective drainage and impure water over four thousand persons
in every million throughout England: these numbers have declined
until in 1888 there died less than two thousand in every million.
The most striking diminution of the deaths from such causes was
found in 1891, in the case of typhoid fever, that diminution
being fifty per cent. As to the scourge which, next to plagues
like the Black Death, was formerly the most dreaded--smallpox--there
died of it in London during the year 1890 just one person. Drainage
in Bristol reduced the death rate by consumption from 4.4 to 2.3; at
Cardiff, from 3.47 to 2.31; and in all England and Wales, from 2.68
in 1851 to 1.55 in 1888.

What can be accomplished by better sanitation is also seen
to-day by a comparison between the death rate among the children
outside and inside the charity schools. The death rate among
those outside in 1881 was twelve in a thousand; while inside,
where the children were under sanitary regulations maintained by
competent authorities, it has been brought down first to eight,
then to four, and finally to less than three in a thousand.

In view of statistics like these, it becomes clear that
Edwin Chadwick and his compeers among the sanitary authorities
have in half a century done far more to reduce the rate of
disease and death than has been done in fifteen hundred years by
all the fetiches which theological reasoning could devise or
ecclesiastical power enforce.

Not less striking has been the history of hygiene in France:
thanks to the decline of theological control over the
universities, to the abolition of monasteries, and to such
labours in hygienic research and improvement as those of Tardieu,
Levy, and Bouchardat, a wondrous change has been wrought in
public health. Statistics carefully kept show that the mean
length of human life has been remarkably increased. In the
eighteenth century it was but twenty-three years; from 1825 to
1830 it was thirty-two years and eight months; and since 1864,
thirty-seven years and six months.


       IV. THE RELATION OF SANITARY SCIENCE TO RELIGION.

The question may now arise whether this progress in sanitary
science has been purchased at any real sacrifice of religion in
its highest sense. One piece of recent history indicates an
answer to this question. The Second Empire in France had its head
in Napoleon III, a noted Voltairean. At the climax of his power
he determined to erect an Academy of Music which should be the
noblest building of its kind. It was projected on a scale never
before known, at least in modern times, and carried on for years,
millions being lavished upon it. At the same time the emperor
determined to rebuild the Hotel-Dieu, the great Paris hospital;
this, too, was projected on a greater scale than anything of the
kind ever before known, and also required millions. But in the
erection of these two buildings the emperor's determination was
distinctly made known, that with the highest provision for
aesthetic enjoyment there should be a similar provision, moving
on parallel lines, for the relief of human suffering. This plan
was carried out to the letter: the Palace of the Opera and the
Hotel-Dieu went on with equal steps, and the former was not
allowed to be finished before the latter. Among all the "most
Christian kings" of the house of Bourbon who had preceded him for
five hundred years, history shows no such obedience to the
religious and moral sense of the nation. Catharine de' Medici and
her sons, plunging the nation into the great wars of religion,
never showed any such feeling; Louis XIV, revoking the Edict of
Nantes for the glory of God, and bringing the nation to sorrow
during many generations, never dreamed of making the construction
of his palaces and public buildings wait upon the demands of
charity. Louis XV, so subservient to the Church in all things,
never betrayed the slightest consciousness that, while making
enormous expenditures to gratify his own and the national
vanity, he ought to carry on works, _pari passu_, for charity. Nor
did the French nation, at those periods when it was most largely
under the control of theological considerations, seem to have any
inkling of the idea that nation or monarch should make provision
for relief from human suffering, to justify provision for the
sumptuous enjoyment of art: it was reserved for the second half
of the nineteenth century to develop this feeling so strongly,
though quietly, that Napoleon III, notoriously an unbeliever in all
orthodoxy, was obliged to recognise it and to set this great example.

Nor has the recent history of the United States been less
fruitful in lessons. Yellow fever, which formerly swept not only
Southern cities but even New York and Philadelphia, has now been
almost entirely warded off. Such epidemics as that in Memphis a
few years since, and the immunity of the city from such
visitations since its sanitary condition was changed by Mr.
Waring, are a most striking object lesson to the whole country.
Cholera, which again and again swept the country, has ceased to
be feared by the public at large. Typhus fever, once so deadly,
is now rarely heard of. Curious is it to find that some of the
diseases which in the olden time swept off myriads on myriads in
every country, now cause fewer deaths than some diseases thought
of little account, and for the cure of which people therefore
rely, to their cost, on quackery instead of medical science.

This development of sanitary science and hygiene in the
United States has also been coincident with a marked change in
the attitude of the American pulpit as regards the theory of
disease. In this country, as in others, down to a period within
living memory, deaths due to want of sanitary precautions were
constantly dwelt upon in funeral sermons as "results of national
sin," or as "inscrutable Providences." That view has mainly
passed away among the clergy of the more enlightened parts of the
country, and we now find them, as a rule, active in spreading
useful ideas as to the prevention of disease. The religious press
has been especially faithful in this respect, carrying to every
household more just ideas of sanitary precautions and hygienic living.

The attitude even of many among the most orthodox rulers in
church and state has been changed by facts like these. Lord
Palmerston refusing the request of the Scotch clergy that a fast
day be appointed to ward off cholera, and advising them to go
home and clean their streets,--the devout Emperor William II
forbidding prayer-meetings in a similar emergency, on the ground
that they led to neglect of practical human means of help,--all
this is in striking contrast to the older methods.

Well worthy of note is the ground taken in 1893, at
Philadelphia, by an eminent divine of the Protestant Episcopal
Church. The Bishop of Pennsylvania having issued a special call
to prayer in order to ward off the cholera, this clergyman
refused to respond to the call, declaring that to do so, in the
filthy condition of the streets then prevailing in Philadelphia,
would be blasphemous.

In summing up the whole subject, we see that in this field,
as in so many others, the triumph of scientific thought has
gradually done much to evolve in the world not only a theology
but also a religious spirit more and more worthy of the goodness
of God and of the destiny of man.[[95]]


                               CHAPTER XV.
              FROM "DEMONIACAL POSSESSION" TO INSANITY.

         I. THEOLOGICAL IDEAS OF LUNACY AND ITS TREATMENT.

OF all the triumphs won by science for humanity, few have
been farther-reaching in good effects than the modern treatment
of the insane. But this is the result of a struggle long and
severe between two great forces. On one side have stood the
survivals of various superstitions, the metaphysics of various
philosophies, the dogmatism of various theologies, the literal
interpretation of various sacred books, and especially of our
own--all compacted into a creed that insanity is mainly or
largely demoniacal possession; on the other side has stood
science, gradually accumulating proofs that insanity is always
the result of physical disease.

I purpose in this chapter to sketch, as briefly as I may, the history
of this warfare, or rather of this evolution of truth out of error.

Nothing is more simple and natural, in the early stages of
civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of
evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of
physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes;
he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good
being, but more frequently to the malice of an evil being.

Especially is this the case with diseases. The real causes
of disease are so intricate that they are reached only after ages
of scientific labour; hence they, above all, have been attributed
to the influence of evil spirits.[[97]]

But, if ordinary diseases were likely to be attributed to
diabolical agency, how much more diseases of the brain, and
especially the more obscure of these! These, indeed, seemed to
the vast majority of mankind possible only on the theory of
Satanic intervention: any approach to a true theory of the
connection between physical causes and mental results is one of
the highest acquisitions of science.

Here and there, during the whole historic period, keen men
had obtained an inkling of the truth; but to the vast multitude,
down to the end of the seventeenth century, nothing was more
clear than that insanity is, in many if not in most cases,

