day, so clearly proclaimed the natural origin of all disease, and thereby assisted in producing a revolution in medicine. Yet the bishop begins by flatly contradicting him. Not all diseases, he says, are produced by nature, or even by our own vices and bad habits; some are sent directly from God Himself as trials of our faith or punishments for some forgotten sin (1 Cor. xi. 30), and whenever we are conscious of this we should by no means go to a physician, but bear patiently the chastening of the Lord till He sees fit to remove it (Micah vii. 9). And more than this; some diseases may, by the permission of God, be caused by Satan (Job ii. 6, 7), and here also our chief object should be to emulate the patience of the patriarch. The good bishop, however, did not let his theories interfere with his provision of medical aid for the poor, and in the East the Hippocratic tradition was still strong enough to neutralise the worst effects of these doctrines. But when we come to consider the corresponding period in Western Europe, we shall find this theologic pathology still further developed and joined to a theologic therapeusis and a belief in the sole efficacy of prayer and the relics of the saints, which, had it been carried to its logical conclusion, would have made medicine not only a useless but an impious profession.

It was

Among the more prominent forms of pagan religion the worship of the medical divinities seems to have lingered longest; nor did the opponents of Christianity hesitate to compare the cures wrought in the temples of Esculapius and Serapis with the miracles of saints and martyrs, and even with those recorded by the evangelists. natural, therefore, that the Church, as soon as she obtained control of the secular arm, should proceed to attack these presumptuous rivals; but it was not until a century after the conversion of Constantine that the practice of “incubation" in heathen temples was finally suppressed by the decrees of the emperors and the violence of the Christians.

In the year 391, after numerous and bloody contests in the streets of Alexandria, a fanatical mob, headed by their

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archbishop Theophilus, "the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue," took possession of the Serapeum. The temple was demolished, and a church built upon its ruins; the library was destroyed, and its learned frequenters replaced by monks, men indeed in shape (says a disgusted philosopher), but swine in their habits". Similar scenes were enacted in other parts of the empire, and the imperial edicts condemned, with impartial severity, both heathen and heretics, but St. Jerome, commentating about A.D. 415 on Isaiah lxv. 4 (septuagint version), could still take his illustrations from the temples of Esculapius.

The Christians, too, soon began to imitate the practices they had condemned. Models of healed limbs, etc., formerly suspended in temples, were now dedicated in churches, and the dream oracles sought of old at the shrines of Esculapius and Serapis were invoked in the convents of mediæval Italy and the churches of modern Greece. Archbishop Theophilus perhaps thought it well to provide a substitute for the form of worship he had suppressed, and had no difficulty in discovering the bones of two martyrs, John of Edessa and Cyrus of Alexandria, which he translated to a spot outside the city "much haunted by demons". Here his nephew and worthy successor, St. Cyril, built them a church, in which "incubation" was practised exactly as it had been in the pagan temples. Some of the cures wrought there have been handed down to us by an ancient writer, who declares that though "less than all publicans" he has been privileged to see and share in the marvels he describes. The following is a typical example. A certain Theodore of Alexandria, having taken poison in his food, was afflicted by grievous pains, for which the physicians could do nothing. So he went and slept in the church of SS. Cyrus and John, who appeared to him in a dream, and told him to eat an asp. The startled Theodore awoke and crossed himself, for he thought that, because of his sins, devils had been permitted to personate the holy martyrs, and though the dream was twice repeated he still hesitated to obey. Then the saints,

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in pity for his want of faith, bade him go at daybreak and eat what he would find by a well outside the church. He found there what seemed like a melon, and had nearly finished eating it when he discovered that he held in his hand not the remains of a melon but the tail of an asp. This gave him such a shock that he vomited not only the rest of the asp which he had eaten, but also the poison taken some time before; and the historian concludes: Thus the saints cured, not contraries by contraries, as do mortal doctors, but likes by the use of likes". The martyrs Cyrus and John are evidently well suited to become patron saints of homœopathy. And just as the invocation of Cyrus and John was substituted for the worship of Serapis, so the place of Esculapius was taken by two yet more famous medical saints, Cosmas and Damian, in some of whose churches "incubation" was practised, and whose healing miracles were in no way inferior to those of their colleagues at Alexandria.

NOTE.

Jerome, Ep., 84; Basil, Ep., 84, 94, 189, and Interrogatio, 55, An Medicina Usus Pietatis Instituto Conveniat? Gregory, Orat., 43; Sozomen, H. E., 3, 16 (for St. Ephrem); Eunapius, Life of Ædesius; Bolland, Acta Sanctorum, 31st Jan. (Cyrus and John) and 27th Sept. (Cosmas and Damian). See also Haeser, Geschichte Christlicher Krankenpflege und Pflegerschaften; Chastel, Etudes Historiques sur L'Influence de la Charité durant les Premiers Siècles Chrétiens; Burdett, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, etc.

XXV.-NESTORIAN MEDICAL SCHOOLS.

THE great importance of the Nestorians in the history of medicine must excuse a short incursion into the domain of theology. In the year 429 Nestorius, then recently appointed to the see of Constantinople, preached a series of sermons in which he declared that the title "Mother of God" could not rightly be applied to the Blessed Virgin. We need not repeat his arguments; the whole tendency of the age was

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against him; he was accused, despite his protests, of separating the natures of Christ, and in 431 the Council of Ephesus pronounced the anathema of the Church against the archbishop and all his followers. But the heresy still flourished in Syria and the East, and the Nestorians, debarred from attaining eminence in Church or State, devoted themselves, like the Jews at a somewhat later date, especially to medicine.

At Edessa there already existed a famous school, where lectures were given in Syriac, Greek, and Persian. There were also two large hospitals, one tracing its origin to St. Ephrem, the other exclusively for women, built at the beginning of the century by Bishop Rabboula, who pulled down four pagan temples for the purpose. All these institutions came into the hands by the heretics, and they established at Edessa a school of medicine which rivalled, for a time, that of Alexandria. Love of life conquered even the hatred of heresy, and Nestorian practitioners were to be found at the orthodox court of Byzantium, some of whom appear to have become trusted physicians to the lords both of Rome and Persia. But this could not long continue; the orthodox soul of Bishop Cyrus was vexed by the presence of men whom he considered worse than heathens, and in 489 he prevailed on the Emperor Zeno to publish an edict, ordering the school to be closed, and the heretics to be driven from the empire. Armed with this, he not only expelled the Nestorians, but demolished their lecture halls, and from the materials built a church, which he triumphantly dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God.

The fugitives were received in Persia by the liberalminded Shah, Kobad, whose yet greater son, Chosroes Nushirvan, soon afterwards welcomed the last of the pagan philosophers, whom the edict of Justinian had expelled from the schools of Alexandria and Athens. The doctrine which the Nestorians had resisted was one singularly repugnant, as they understood it, both to Persians and Moslem: "I will cleave the skull of the blasphemer, who says the Eternal

God has a mother!" is an exclamation attributed to a Mahometan conqueror; and this may have something to do with the remarkable favour shown to those heretics both by the Shahs and the Caliphs. Their skill in medicine, and their hostility to the orthodox Christians of the empire, would doubtless still further recommend them to the favour of their new rulers.

When the exiles arrived in Persia they found at Gondisapor a kind of school or university, but whether in the hands of Zoroastrians, or of descendants of the Persian Christians said to have been converted by St. Thomas the Apostle, we do not know. It may, indeed, have been of Greek origin, for, though the Arabic story that physicians sent by Aurelian to attend his sister, the wife of Sapor, settled there, is unfounded, the town was originally peopled by captives from the cities and armies of the empire. In any case it rapidly became Nestorian, though the heretics, with remarkable toleration, allowed the pagan philosophers to take part in the teaching. As at Edessa, the medicalfaculty seems to have predominated, and there are even traces of clinical instruction, for we find the students of theology forbidden to "follow" the physicians, while those of medicine are urged not to omit the daily reading of religious books. Another chronicler is yet more explicit. All the Christian students, he says, began their day's work by reading the Psalms and Gospels, then the theologians betook themselves to the study of the commentators, while the medicals went to the hospital. The same applies to other Nestorian schools at Seleucia and elsewhere, in each of which medicine seems to have been studied, and a Catholic historian remarks with astonishment that the physicians and jurists had an equal vote with the bishops and presbyters in the election of the patriarch.

Meanwhile Nestorian Christianity spread rapidly in Persia, and its missionaries penetrated to the confines of China and the heart of India. It may have been information thus obtained which induced Nushirvan to send his own