medical virtues attributed to saliva. The use of this remedy had early Oriental sanction. It is clearly found in Egypt. Pliny devotes a considerable part of one of his chapters to it; Galen approved it; Vespasian, when he visited Alexandria, is said to have cured a blind man by applying saliva to his eyes; but the great example impressed most forcibly upon the mediæval mind was the use of it ascribed in the fourth Gospel to Jesus himself: thence it came not only into church ceremonial, but largely into medical practice.[1]
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of St. Roch of Montpellier and St. Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures until they too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost prestige in some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into fashion.[2]
Even such serious matters as fractures, calculus, and difficult parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its greatest triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this hour the ex votos hanging at such shrines as those of St. Geneviève at Paris, of St. Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at Chartres, of the Virgin at Einsiedeln, in the cave of Lourdes, nay, even at the fountain of La Salette, in spite of the fact that
- ↑ As to the use of saliva in medicine, see Story, Castle of St. Angelo, and other essays, London, 1877, pp. 208, and elsewhere. For Pliny, Galen, and others, see the same, p. 211; see also the Book of Tobit, chap. xi, 2–13. For the case of Vespasian, see Suetonius, Life of Vespasian; also Tacitus, Historia, lib. iv, c. 81. For its use by St. Francis Xavier, see Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, London, 1872.
- ↑ For one of these lists of saints curing diseases, see Pettigrew, Medical Superstitions of the Middle Ages; for another, see Jacob, Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96–100; also Rydberg, p. 69; also Maury, Rambaud, and others. For a comparison of fashions in miracles with fashions in modern healing agents, see Littré, Médecine et Médecins, pp. 118, 136, and elsewhere; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143.
