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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
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George Bernard Shaw , Annajanska
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In this section we will look at how the Church has affected
the development of medical and other related sciences, from
ancient times to the modern day.
Reason is God's crowning gift to man.
Sophocles (c.496-406 BC), Antigone
Already in ancient times medicine had started the transition
from magic to science. Various types of surgery were carried
out, including plastic surgery. Stone Age man had practised
successful brain surgery, a fact witnessed by healed trephined
skulls found in Neolithic deposits all over Europe. Ancient
Egyptian papyri emphasise the importance of cleanliness and
hygiene , a view shared by the Mesopotamians. They built sewers
and water closets over 4,000 years ago. Greeks and Romans were
even keener on public health. They built and used public lavatories,
sewers, aqueducts, water cisterns, and hot and cold baths. For
Greek physicians even conditions like epilepsy had rational
explanations, and were not supernatural in nature*.
As the Greek physician Hippocrates put it in On the Sacred
Disease, a work on this condition, “Men regard its
nature and cause as divine from ignorance and wonder, and this
idea is maintained by their inability to understand it”.
Around 400 years before Jesus, Hippocrates had founded the
scientific study of medicine on the proposition that every illness
has a natural cause. A Hippocratic text called An Ancient
Medicine asserts that, using Hippocratic methods, causes
and cures would in time be discovered for all illnesses. In
On the Sacred Disease he referred to those who invoked
demonic forces as charlatans guilty of ignorance, deceit and
fraud. After Hippocrates progress was made quickly. Around AD
30 the Epicurean philosopher Celsus knew how to perform cataract
operations and had mastered the use of ligatures. He learned
about muscles and bones by dissecting animals. He understood
the importance of hygiene and taught that prevention was better
than cure. Another great name in ancient medicine was that of
Galen of Pergamum, a Greek who was appointed as personal physician
to Marcus Aurelius in AD 163. His death marked the end of centuries
of medical creativity. After him Christians replaced rational
medicine with their own supernatural medicine. Most of Galen's writings have been lost — probably destroyed by early Christians.
Those that survived provided by far the best medical treatise
available until the Middle Ages and beyond, but after the introduction
of a formal system of Church censorship, his surviving works
were placed on the Index.
Faith has no merit where human reason supplies the truth.
Pope Gregory I (c.540-604), Homilies
The ascendancy of the Christian Church dates from around the
time of the death of Galen. Having progressed so far, rational
medicine was now abandoned. Medicine in the Bible is entirely
supernatural. The Church developed the view that real practical
medicine savoured of black magic. In any case it was wrong to
try to subvert God's holy will by interfering with the natural
course of events. It was God who caused illness. He was responsible
for cures just as he was responsible for death. Illness was
indisputably caused by sin. The Bible said so, and so did Church
Councils. The only alternative explanations given credence were
diabolical possession, witchcraft and other satanic machinations.
In Christendom, from AD 300 to around 1700 all serious mental
conditions were understood as symptoms of demonic possession.
Since illness was thought to be caused by supernatural agents,
cures had to be essentially supernatural as well. Every cure
was literally miraculous , and these miracles could be effected
only by prayer, penance and the assistance of saints. To claim
otherwise was heretical and blasphemous.
The Christian ideal was that women should die rather than allow
themselves to be helped by a physician. Some women won their
sainthood for doing no more than declining medical assistance.
In the fourth century Saint Gorgonia, the daughter of two saints,
was trampled by a team of mules, causing multiple broken bones
and crushed internal organs. She would not see a doctor, as
she thought it indecent. According to Christian sources this
modesty miraculously cured her, and a second such self-healing
miracle assured her sainthood. Today, Gorgonia is a patron saint
for people afflicted by bodily ills. We do not know how many
thousands of other women with identically modest Christian scruples
died following her example and are now forgotten.
All manner of illnesses were allocated a patron saint, whose
intervention was required to work the required miraculous cure.
Ergotism, known as sacer ignis or holy fire,
was held to be alleviated by the intervention of the Virgin
Mary. Erysipelas, an infectious disease causing a reddening
of the skin, was dealt with by St Anthony the Great and was
thus called St Anthony's fire. St Vitus took care
of chorea, which was thus known as St Vitus" dance.
St Basilissa took care of chilblains; St Elmo of colic; St Roche
of cholera; St Lucy, eye diseases; St Blaise, throat problems;
St Apollonia, toothache; St Fiacre, haemorrhoids and venereal
disease; and so on. Sleepwalking and insanity were regarded
as manifestations of diabolic possession and both came under
the care of St Dympna, the patron saint of the possessed. There
was literally a saint for every disease. Other holy people could
work miracles too; for example scrofula (a form of tuberculosis)
could be cured by the touch of kings, by virtue of their divine
appointment. It was thus known as The King's Evil.
French and English kings worked miraculous cures for centuries.
Even Protestants accepted it. From 1634 until the mid-eighteenth
century, the Book of Common Prayer included a ritual of royal
healing, and the rituals continued later still. Dr Samuel Johnson,
as a child, was touched by Queen Anne as late as 1712 , and
there were still people attributing the power to Queen Victoria
in the nineteenth century.
By the Middle Ages, medicine had regressed on all fronts in
Christian lands. Muslims who came into contact with Christians,
as Usama of Shaizar did during the Crusades, were shocked by
the crudity of their medicine — and it was not only medicine,
but public health too. Whereas Muslims adopted public baths
(hammams) and insisted on washing before meals, Christians adopted
the view that it was wrong to wash. It was flying in the face
of God to presume to clean off his honest Christian filth. Christians
were obliged to accept the will of God and the disease and misery
that went with it. Queen Elizabeth I was famously said to have
bathed twice a year, whether she needed to or not.
The practice of medicine was monopolised by the Church, so
laymen who practised it became criminals. Then the Church stopped
certain clergymen practising it as well. Monastic medicine was
prohibited by the Synod of Clermont in 1130. Thenceforth the
practice of medicine was reserved to the secular clergy. A generation
later, in 1163, the Council of Tours interpreted the maxim ecclesia
abhorret a sanguine (the church abhors the shedding of
blood) as meaning that no churchman could practise surgery.
To the extent that it survived at all surgery was now the province
of barbers, executioners, bath-keepers and proto-veterinarians.
Monks still went off to the barber-surgeon for the dual purpose
of having their tonsures shaved and their arms bled, but this
was about the limit of surgical health care permitted by the
Church. Dissections of dead bodies were permitted in selected
universities, but nothing of any value was learned because no
research was carried out. The wisdom of the ancients was repeated
to students parrot fashion — including their errors, such
as the liver's five lobes (which do not exist in human
beings). By now Galen, even though a pagan, was recognised as
knowing more than any Christian, so his word like Aristotle's,
was treated as indisputable. For hundreds of years, everyone
saw what he or she was supposed to see, rather than what was
actually there:
During these dissections the learned professor would read
aloud from Galen while a lowly surgeon opened the body. Then
the professor would point toward the organ and describe the
five-lobed liver and other miracles of Galenic anatomy, such
was the blinding weight of tradition and authority*.
Freelance anatomy for original research was illegal. Scientists
like Leonardo da Vinci were obliged to carry on their anatomical
research in secret. Leonardo's famous mirror writing was
used to disguise his findings, in case the Church authorities
found out about them. His notes were not published for more
than 200 years after his death. Many Christian ideas about biology
were spectacularly wrong. Leading theologians taught that women
had more water in their bodies than men, so if a humid south
wind blew during pregnancy, or if there were frequent rains,
the baby was more likely to be born female*.
The functions of the organs were also misunderstood. According
to the approved view the liver secreted yellow bile; the spleen,
black bile; the heart, blood; and the brain, phlegm. A Greek
thinker, Alcmaeon of Crotona, had identified the brain as the
central organ in the higher activities of humankind around 500
BC, but 2,000 years later Christian authorities were teaching
that the brain was merely a phlegm-secreting gland.
By identifying the new learning with heresy we make orthodoxy
synonymous with ignorance.
Desiderius Erasmus (c.1469-1536)
By the sixteenth century the revival of Greek learning was
having an effect. The supernatural outlook of the Church was
challenged by rationalism, and advances were once more possible.
As a medical historian says, comparing Eastern and Western medicine:
When Europe became static and religious during the Middle
Ages, its medicine resembled Indian medicine tremendously,
except that Indian medicine was much better. When in Europe,
through the Renaissance, the Greek attitude prevailed again,
Europe surpassed India rapidly*.
It is no coincidence that modern medical terminology is largely
derived from Greek, for the ancient Greeks were still the best
medical authorities available after more than 1,000 years of
Christian hegemony. Ancient techniques could now be revived.
For example the ligature, abandoned since the time of Celsus,
was re-introduced by Ambrose Paré (1510-1590). But the
Church did not yield ground easily. Cures were still carried
out using exorcism, consecrated bells, relics, biblical readings,
holy water and torture. The insane were still regarded as possessed
by evil spirits. When Johann Weyer explained that mental illness
was the real cause underlying the symptoms that had been attributed
to witches and evil spirits, the Church denounced him, and his
book was placed on the Index*.
He was himself accused of witchcraft and was obliged to flee
for his life. In time Weyer was vindicated: the Church belatedly
updated its ideas and stopped torturing the insane.
Bishops licensed all manner of medical practice from surgery
to physic and midwifery, which gave them control of all these
disciplines. Blood-letting was still the standard treatment
for all manner of ills in the sixteenth century and would continue
to be for another three centuries. Anyone who suggested that
the ancient Hippocratic medical techniques might be superior
risked charges of heresy. When Pierre Brissot (1478-1522) of
Paris advocated Hippocratic techniques, he was considered a
worse heretic than Martin Luther. Gasparo Tagliacozzi (1546-1599),
Professor of Medicine at Bologna, used skin grafts for plastic
surgery. He was charged with impiety, and his rhinoplasty operations
were prohibited. His technique was not revived until 1822. Sometimes
it is difficult to tell what advances might have been made.
In Christianismi Restitutio, a work for which he was
burned at the stake in 1553, Michael Servetus mentioned pulmonary
circulation — realising the function of the lungs three
generations before William Harvey, who is now generally credited
with discovering the circulation of the blood.
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when
they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
Laurens van der Post (1906-1996), The Lost World of the
Kalahari
Despite the advances, the Church still held medicine back roughly
to the level of a pre-literate society. Physicians, licensed
by the Church authorities, continued to diagnose cases of witchcraft*.
They appeared in court as prosecution witnesses, confirming
that fits and other symptoms were the product of witchcraft.
They claimed to have discovered devil's marks on the accused.
They even gave evidence confirming that victims had vomited
metal pins and other artefacts without having swallowed them.
In many ways the medical practices of the indigenous people
of South America were still in advance of European Christians.
They carried out trepanation and amputations, excised tumours
and used anaesthetics. They had developed prosthetic techniques
and were using the jaws of decapitated ants as clamps in sutures.
The Church was still clinging to the theory that illness was
caused by sin or demonic agencies. Clergymen were still claiming
to cure illness by magical means. In 1606 the Royal College
of Physicians attempted to prevent the Rev. John Bell from purporting
to cure fevers by writing charms on a piece of paper*.
For the Church, Illness was still caused by sin and so was to
be cured only by means approved by the Church. Other methods
were not to be countenanced, whether magical or rational. The
Anglican Church required its priests and churchwardens to denounce
any parishioners who practised medicine without permission*.
The Church was still responsible for licensing practitioners
of medicine. Genuine researchers were unlikely to be licensed,
although numerous questionable practitioners were, including
a number of leading astrologers*.
At base, illness was caused by sin, and that was all there
was to it. The Flemish scientist J. B. van Helmont (1577-1644)
attacked such theories, regarding miracle cures as natural magic.
The Louvain medical faculty denounced him in 1623. Subsequently
he was called before the Inquisition and imprisoned. To the
extent that there was a genuine scientific theory at all, it
was the ancient one espoused by Galen, that illness was caused
by an imbalance in the four humours in the body. The Church's enemy Paracelsus developed a much better theory. He rejected
Galen's theory, and speculated about seed-like entities
that invaded the body. Paracelsus thought these seed-like disease-carriers
entered the body through the air, or through food and drink.
Different agents attacked different organs and thus caused different
diseases. In essence he had correctly identified the mechanism
by which many infectious illnesses are communicated. An important
consequence was that Paracelsus realised that it was necessary
to identify specific cures for specific diseases. Physicians
had previously occupied themselves looking for a panacea —
a divinely sanctioned nostrum that would cure all diseases.
The Church opposed the scientific method and was hostile to
scientific discoveries by Paracelsus or anyone else. While freethinkers
like Condorcet and Voltaire advocated inoculation against smallpox,
it was condemned in France by university faculties of theology.
But the Church could not deny the efficacy of medicines, and
views gradually changed. Now, instead of banning medical practices,
it sought to reassert its medical monopoly. The Church now became
interested in drugs. New ones from South America were exploited
by churchmen. For example the Jesuits exploited quinine, introduced
from Peru in the 1630s. It was even known as "the Jesuit
powder". Willem Piso (1611-1675) learned the use of ipecacuanha
for treating amoebic dysentery from indigenous inhabitants of
Brazil. Emetine, an alkaloid of ipecacuanha, is still used for
the same purpose today.
.
I was lost in a great forest at night, with only a small
flickering light to guide me. A stranger came and said to
me "My friend, put out your candle, so that you will
find the way better". That man was a theologian.
Denis Diderot, Pensées sur la Religion
Until the Enlightenment the state of European medical knowledge
was still no better, and arguably rather worse, than that of
the ancient Greeks. Useful research was not possible while the
Church exercised control. In fact the Church's ignorance
often made medical problems all the greater. When plagues and
other epidemics swept through Europe, devout Christians gathered
in churches to pray for deliverance. In doing so they permitted
the infection to spread that much faster and suffered high mortality
rates as a result. Christians in some French towns confined
local prostitutes to leper houses during Holy Week. We can only
guess at the consequences of this particular act of piety.
Gradually the hold of the Church was relaxed as new ideas filtered
into Europe from the Americas and from the East. Thus for example,
innoculation was learned from the Turks in the eighteenth century,
having already been used to prevent smallpox for 1,000 years
in the East. Priests and pilgrims had been passing through Turkey
for centuries, but it was the wife a British ambassador who
thought to introduce the practice of innoculation to western
Europe, and had to fight the establishment to do so*.
Original thought and open minds also helped. Quakers, who rejected
religious dogma, took to medicine in significant numbers, as
it was the only learned profession open to them in England at
the time. They provided many of the outstanding physicians of
the age. Significant advances were made by Quakers such as John
Fothergill (diphtheria and neuralgia) , John Lettsom (alcoholism)
, Robert Willan (dermatology) , Thomas Hodgkin (Hodgkin's disease)
and Joseph Lister (1827-1912) (antiseptic surgery).
Infant mortality also became an issue. In France, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau was largely responsible for discarding the practice
of swaddling babies, and of using wet nurses. French medicine
was finally freed from the grip of the Church in 1794 when the
Ecole de Santé was opened under the new secular
government. Paris soon became the European centre of medical
research, attracting men like Franz Joseph Gall, who had been
obliged to leave Austria because of his lack of religious belief.
No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good.
Bishop Mandell Creighton (1843-1901), Life and Letters
of Mandell Creighton
Eastern medicine continued to filter into Europe during the
nineteenth century. For example, hypnosis for anaesthetic purposes
had long been known in the East; the technique was introduced
to Britain by James Esdaile on his return from India around
1840. Indian physicians, it would turn out, had known about
the link between rats and plague in the fifth century BC.
Inconvenient discoveries could always be incorporated into
the religious scheme of things in one way or another. When the
existence of bacteria was established, true believers knowing
for a fact that sin was the cause of illness deduced that bacteria
must be the result of illness, rather than the cause of it.
This is what millions of Christian Scientists believe today.
That medical cures could be effected only by supernatural means
was still accepted by the faithful. The correct procedure was
to use holy relics, to undergo penance, to pray or to fast.
As late as 1853 the Presbytery of Edinburgh petitioned Queen
Victoria for a nationwide fast against a cholera epidemic. For
centuries cleanliness had been considered a sin; it had been
a Christian's duty to accept God's natural filth except
in exceptional circumstances.
Ideas started to change in the wake of medical science. Now,
as John Wesley put it, cleanliness was next to godliness. By
Victorian times baths were acceptable for all.
The battle was far from over. Christian leaders were still
denying medical help to those who needed it. Leo XII (pope 1823-1829)
forbade vaccination during a smallpox epidemic because it was
"against the natural law". This undoubtedly increased
mortality, particularly among the Jews that the Pope had confined
to a cramped ghetto. Another favourite Christian idea was that
all manner of illness was caused by sinful sex. Coitus interruptus
was said to cause nervous disorders and pelvic complaints in
women*. Masturbation
caused all manner of problems. In addition to those mentioned
already (see page 483), it caused gastric disorders, vomiting,
coughing, hoarseness, palsy, lethargy, pallor, emaciation, facial
cysts, amnesia, dementia, paralysis, fever, palpitations, headaches,
dizziness, tremors, cramps, chest pain, abdominal pain and kidney
problems*. It also caused
suicides. In 1758 Dr Simon Tissot of Lausanne had published
Onania in which he claimed that masturbation caused
the brain to desiccate so that it could be heard rattling around
in the skull. The book was a best seller through Christian Europe,
the last edition appearing in 1905. One can so easily imagine
generations of Christian schoolmasters, shaking children's heads for evidence of sin, while taking care not to shake their
own. Such teachings are the most extreme nonsense, with no scientific
foundation at all. They contrast starkly not only with modern
ideas but also with ancient ones. Galen had suggested that both
sexual intercourse and masturbation were healthy practices,
an idea adopted by the Muslim philosopher Avicenna (died 1037).
Johann von Wesel, a priest who studied and advocated these ideas,
was convicted of heresy at Mainz in 1479 by an Inquisitor, and
died two
years later under sentence of imprisonment for life.
Gynaecology, practised only by men in the nineteenth century,
suffered especially badly from the ignorance fostered by the
Church. Hysteria was believed to be caused by ambulatory wombs,
and could thus be suffered only by women. The only evidence
for this was the word's etymology. It followed that hysteria
could be cured by preventing the womb from misbehaving, for
example by operating to remove the ovaries. Women's bodies
were still mysterious and presented plenty of scope for original
research. J. Marion Finns perfected techniques of vaginal surgery
on black slave women. Surgeons like Isaac Baker Brown treated
women for unlikely complaints like gyromania. Any woman
displaying "a morbid desire to spin round and round, her
waist encircled by a male arm" stood to be diagnosed as
suffering from gyromania. Such women, who sound to
modern ears to have been no more afflicted than any keen dancer,
were treated surgically by cutting into the muscles of their
calves and buttocks. Baker Brown also practised clitorectomies
— that favourite treatment advocated by Christians opposed
to the sin of female masturbation*.
The Church had no problem with surgical techniques to keep
women's sexuality in check, but they were vocal in opposing
real medical advances, for example in anaesthesia. Anaesthesia
was prohibited on the grounds that if God meant us to suffer,
then we must accept the suffering, and not seek to ameliorate
it. In 1847 the Edinburgh obstetrician Sir James Simpson managed
to introduce the use of chloroform in Scotland, despite opposition
from the Churches. A few years later, in 1853, Queen Victoria
and her physician John Snow were much criticised for defying
the Queen's religious advisers by using chloroform during
her confinement for her seventh child, Prince Leopold. As theologians
pointed out, God had expressed His view on the matter to Eve
in no uncertain terms :
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow
and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children
... Genesis 4:16
God wanted women to suffer in childbirth, so it was wrong for
physicians to interfere. The Roman Church countenanced even
more suffering than the Anglican one.
Between 1587 and 1977 the Roman Church taught that a man may
not marry unless he could impregnate his wife. The reason was
that the prime purpose of marriage was reproduction. Thus for
example a eunuch could not contract a valid marriage. Because
of medieval ignorance about the mechanics of reproduction, there
has never been a similar rule about women. Several times during
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was ruled that a woman
could marry even though her reproductive organs had been surgically
removed*. Theologians
apparently believed that women could conceive without wombs.
Another strange idea formulated by some Christian physicians
in medieval times was that women produce semen just like men.
There was no evidence for this, but the theory was accepted
in Church circles, even after the discovery of the ovum in 1827.
Roman Catholic theologians were still writing about female semen
well into the twentieth century*.
Other absurdities (such as the practice of torturing lunatics
and forcing them to sit in baths of iced water) died out as
the Church lost its control over the care of the insane and
secular physicians took over.
The healing of the sick in His name is as much a part of
the proclamation of the Kingdom as the preaching of the Good
News of Jesus Christ.
Lambeth Conference 1978, Resolution 8
Children's welfare was a new and most un-Christian concern,
which seemed to many to be contrary to the law of God right
up the twentieth century. In England Lettice Fisher, an agnostic,
discovered that the death rate for illegitimate babies was much
higher than that for legitimate ones. She established the National
Council for the Unmarried Mother in 1918, which sought
to reduce infant mortality. Healthcare was simply not a Christian
issue. Freethinkers had first proposed a National Health Service
in the nineteenth century, and the idea was implemented by liberals
and socialists in the twentieth century. Many churchmen opposed
such ideas, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy succeeded in having
one such scheme scuppered in the Republic of Ireland. The Archbishop
of Dublin summoned the Teasoc and informed him that the scheme
was "contrary to Catholic morals"*.
Few would doubt today that Hippocrates was correct in his assertion
that every illness has a natural cause, but the Church denied
it for almost 2,000 years. Now only a few minority sects, such
as the incongruously named Christian Scientists, continue to
do so. Even so, various Churches still oppose medical progress.
Heart transplants have been opposed on the medieval grounds
that the heart is the repository of the soul. When human hearts
were first stopped deliberately during surgical operation it
was still necessary to seek approval from the Churches. In Britain
the Archbishop of Canterbury was consulted in 1957, before an
artificial pump could be used to take over the function of the
heart during surgery.
Blood transfusions and organ transplants are still opposed
by a number of Church groups. Techniques such as the implantation
of foetal brain cells to alleviate Parkinson's Disease
have also been attacked. Continuing their traditional antipathy
to medical progress, Christian Churches are also attacking medical
progress in birth control, male and female fertility, stem cell
research, and the genetic elimination of hereditary diseases.
Many Christians have opposed research into the virus that causes
AIDS and even the dissemination of information about it. The
grounds, the same as those previously applied to information
about syphilis and a host of other preventable ills, are that
AIDS is the judgement of God and it is not our place to interfere
with his judgement.
Children of ardent Christian frequently die of treatable diseases
such as diabetes — around 300 over the last 25 years in
the US alone — because their parent's Churches continue
to teach the traditional Christian doctrine that only God can
heal the sick*.
Religion has not civilised man, man has civilised religion.
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
To sum up, the Church has opposed all manner of advance in
medicine. It suppressed the rational medicine of the ancient
world, destroyed medical books, and promoted its own pseudo-medicine
based on supernaturalism. It burned medical researchers and
other proto-scientists as heretics. It opposed anatomical research
and taught that illness was caused by sin. It denied medical
assistance to millions, including surgery, inoculation, anaesthetics
and prophylaxis. It promoted a body of falsehoods about the
medical consequences of various forms of sexual activity, and
has been prepared to see people die rather than contravene the
word of God by permitting medical assistance. Elsewhere (pages
357- 363) we have seen that it has a poor record in respect
to the treatment of the sick, notably the mentally ill, the
deaf, the physically handicapped, lepers, women in labour, indeed
anyone who was unlucky enough to became ill or injured. In classical
Rome life expectancy had been 50-60 years. After a thousand
years of Christian hegemony it had halved to around 25-30 years.
For the 1,500 years that the Church dominated medicine it made
virtually no advance whatsoever. Indeed, almost all major advances
were made despite its efforts. They were made by heretics, by
Muslims, by Jews, or were imported from non-believers outside
Christendom. For centuries the only medical advances within
Christendom were made by enemies of the Church like Paracelsus
, or those who ignored its restrictions, like Leonardo da Vinci.
The Enlightenment brought medicine to many who had been ignored
or maltreated by the Church, notably the insane, the old, the
blind, the deaf and the congenitally deformed. The Enlightenment
also triggered an interest in public health, hygiene and infant
mortality. The Church's traditional position on many medical
matters was challenged by freethinkers: first by humanists,
then by deists, then by atheists. The greatest Christian contributions
came from Quakers and from occasional maverick believers who
were prepared to defy their Churches.
The most curious thing of all is that senior churchmen seem
always to have had at least an inkling about the efficacy of
scientific medicine. During the many centuries that they were
denying medical help to others, many bishops, cardinals and
popes retained their own personal Jewish physicians.
Christian opposition to medical progress is but one example
of Christian hostility to scientific progress, a topic to which
we will return.
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