[[41b]]
As the theological atmosphere thickened, nearly every
country had its long list of saints, each with a special power
over some one organ or disease. The clergy, having great influence
over the medical schools, conscientiously mixed this fetich
medicine with the beginnings of science. In the tenth century,
even at the School of Salerno, we find that the sick were cured
not only by medicine, but by the relics of St. Matthew and others.
Human nature, too, asserted itself, then as now, by making
various pious cures fashionable for a time and then allowing them
to become unfashionable. Just as we see the relics of St. Cosmo
and St. Damian in great vogue during the early Middle Ages, but
out of fashion and without efficacy afterward, so we find in the
thirteenth century that the bones of St. Louis, having come into
fashion, wrought multitudes of cures, while in the fourteenth,
having become unfashionable, they ceased to act, and gave place
for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier and St.
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