college expresses it, "boldly and accustomably took upon them great cures, to the high displeasure of God, the great infamy of the faculty, and the grievous hurt of his Majesty's liege people." Physicians had gradually become distinct from the sacerdotal order on the Continent, and as early as the beginning of the fourteenth century we find that monks were expelled from the hospitals by the University of Vienna for their "insatiate avidity, and flagrant incompetency," and the care of the sick poor given into the hands of the laity. The monks revenged themselves by procuring an order from the Pope, prohibiting physicians from visiting their patients a second time, without summoning a priest to attend also!
From the Protestant era, original investigation and the accumulation of facts from accurate observation proceeded with a rapidity and certainty beyond all previous experience. Their progress was, nevertheless, impeded, and the value of the results produced depreciated by several opposing influences.
The Romish Church, ever intolerant of novelties which did not emanate from herself, viewed with apprehension and hatred all scientific discoveries, since they were subversive of dogmas which infallibility had sanctioned and approved. Roger Bacon was persecuted by a priesthood said to be so ignorant that they knew no property of the circle, except that of keeping out the devil—and the cry of sorcery or heresy was raised against succeeding explorers of Nature to the time of Galileo. It is terrible to think how many great lights must have been extinguished, how many great discoveries nipped in the bud, by the rigorous stamping out of heresy and unholy pursuits, carried on by the Inquisition. And Protestantism, which had its origin in a similar spirit of inquiry, deprecated with almost equal bigotry, though with less power, every conclusion which seemed contrary to her own interpretation of the word of God. God had afflicted Job with horrible diseases, and the history of the demoniacs proved that devils could derange bodily functions; therefore to doubt these causes was to impugn the veracity of the Bible.
As late as the year 1699, the Royal Society was attacked by theologians soon after its foundation, on the ground that the society neglected the wiser and more discerning ancient philosophers, and depended too much on their own unassisted powers—that, by admitting men of all religions and all countries, they endangered the stability of the Established Church—and, more than all, that a philosophy, founded on experiment, was likely to lead to the overthrow of the Christian religion, and even to a formal denial of the existence of God. And about this time, the orthodox and devout Willis, who gave all his Sunday fees in charity, who procured a special early service daily at a church in St. Martin's Lane, in order that he might be able to attend before he visited his patients, and dedicated his treatise, "De Animâ Brutorum," to the Archbishop of Canterbury, was condemned by the
