St. Bernard, in a letter to certain monks, warned them that
to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony neither
with their religion nor with the honour and purity of their
order. This view even found its way into the canon law, which
declared the precepts of medicine contrary to Divine knowledge. As
a rule, the leaders of the Church discouraged the theory that diseases
are due to natural causes, and most of them deprecated a resort to
surgeons and physicians rather than to supernatural means.[[28]]
Out of these and similar considerations was developed the
vast system of "pastoral medicine," so powerful not only through
the Middle Ages, but even in modern times, both among Catholics
and Protestants. As to its results, we must bear in mind that,
while there is no need to attribute the mass of stories regarding
miraculous cures to conscious fraud, there was without doubt, at
a later period, no small admixture of belief biased by
self-interest, with much pious invention and suppression of
facts.
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