There had, indeed, come into the Middle Ages an inheritance
of scientific thought. The ideas of Hippocrates, Celius
Aurelianus, Galen, and their followers, were from time to time
revived; the Arabian physicians, the School of Salerno, such
writers as Salicetus and Guy de Chauliac, and even some of the
religious orders, did something to keep scientific doctrines
alive; but the tide of theological thought was too strong; it
became dangerous even to seem to name possible limits to
diabolical power. To deny Satan was atheism; and perhaps nothing
did so much to fasten the epithet "atheist" upon the medical
profession as the suspicion that it did not fully acknowledge
diabolical interference in mental disease. Following in the lines
of the earlier fathers, St. Anselm, Abelard, St. Thomas Aquinas,
Vincent of Beauvais, all the great doctors in the medieval
Church, some of them in spite of occasional misgivings, upheld
the idea that insanity is largely or mainly demoniacal
possession, basing their belief steadily on the sacred
Scriptures; and this belief was followed up in every quarter by
more and more constant citation of the text "Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live.
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