CHAPTER XXV.
CLERICAL INFLUENCE.
As we have said before, during the dark ages medical knowledge was confined to the clergy, and the same individuals officiated both as priests and physicians. But at length medicine became a separate profession, and the treatment of physical diseases was assigned to one class of men, and the care of moral and religious matters to another. By this division of duties and responsibilities, each department was placed in a condition to cultivate and improve its own province. Each strove to shake off the errors with which superstition and bigotry had enshrined it, and to establish its foundation upon truth and reason. This greatly increased the value and importance of each profession, and made it exclusively responsible for the proper discharge of its own duties; and the good of society requires that the proper limits of each should be distinctly known
