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V. THEOLOGICAL OPPOSITION TO ANATOMICAL STUDIES.
Yet a more serious stumbling-block, hindering the beginnings
of modern medicine and surgery, was a theory regarding the
unlawfulness of meddling with the bodies of the dead. This
theory, like so many others which the Church cherished as
peculiarly its own, had really been inherited from the old pagan
civilizations. So strong was it in Egypt that the embalmer was
regarded as accursed; traces of it appear in Greco-Roman life,
and hence it came into the early Church, where it was greatly
strengthened by the addition of perhaps the most noble of mystic
ideas--the recognition of the human body as the temple of the
Holy Spirit. Hence Tertullian denounced the anatomist Herophilus
as a butcher, and St. Augustine spoke of anatomists generally in
similar terms.
But this nobler conception was alloyed with a medieval
superstition even more effective, when the formula known as the
Apostles' Creed had, in its teachings regarding the resurrection
of the body, supplanted the doctrine laid down by St.
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