and the diseases which were spread as the consequence of the intimate association of the unwholesome hordes from all the nations concerned, resulted in the establishment of thousands of hospitals all over Europe. The provision of homes for the sick was far more common among the Mohammedans than among the Christians of that period. Activity of thought was stimulated, and medical science must have shared in the effects of spirit of inquiry. Some historians have supposed that the infusion of astrological superstitions into the teaching and practice of medicine was largely traceable to the communion with the East in these Holy Wars: but this idea is not supported by anything that we know of the Arab doctors. "I have not found the union of astrology with medicine taught by any writer of that nation," says Sprengel; and his authority is very great. On the other hand the philosophers and theologians of that age were only too eager to seize upon anything mystic, and plenty of materials for their speculations were found in the Greek and Latin manuscripts handed down to them. Superstitions entered into the mental furniture of the age much more directly from Rome and Alexandria than from Bagdad.
That the Arabs of the East could have taught their Christian foes much useful knowledge cannot be doubted. The letter from the Patriarch of Jerusalem to Alfred the Great (see page 131), for example, is proof of the pharmaceutical superiority of the Syrians over the Saxons at that time.
M. Berthelot has shown by abundant evidence in his "History of Alchemy" that the Latin works dealing with chemistry of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries which were very numerous in Christendom, were almost exclusively drawn from Arabic sources.
