" Hence it
was, doubtless, that the Lateran Council, about the beginning of
the thirteenth century, forbade physicians, under pain of
exclusion from the Church, to undertake medical treatment without
calling in ecclesiastical advice.
This view was long cherished in the Church, and nearly two
hundred and fifty years later Pope Pius V revived it by renewing
the command of Pope Innocent and enforcing it with penalties. Not
only did Pope Pius order that all physicians before
admninistering treatment should call in "a physician of the
soul," on the ground, as he declares, that "bodily infirmity
frequently arises from sin," but he ordered that, if at the end
of three days the patient had not made confession to a priest,
the medical man should cease his treatment, under pain of being
deprived of his right to practise, and of expulsion from the
faculty if he were a professor, and that every physician and
professor of medicine should make oath that he was strictly
fulfilling these conditions.
Out of this feeling had grown up another practice, which
made the development of medicine still more difficult--the
classing of scientific men generally with sorcerers and
magic-mongers: from this largely rose the charge of atheism
against physicians, which ripened into a proverb, "Where there
are three physicians there are two atheists.
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