Catholic and Anti-Catholic History
By Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
General Pamphlet No.gen0019 (1920)
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Hilaire Belloc — From the London "Tablet"
I HAD almost written that history is the most important department of all education. To put this without modification would be, of course, to put it wrongly. The most important part is the teaching of dogma; next, and inextricably connected with it, the teaching of morals; next, the securing (and this is also connected with the teaching of dogma and morals) of continuous Catholic daily custom.
History comes, of course, after all these. Any Catholic parent would much rather that his children grow up ignorant of history than ignorant of the Faith or of sound morals, or of Catholic custom and habit. Nevertheless, there is an aspect in which history may be called the most important of all subjects taught. And that aspect is precisely the purely scholastic aspect.
If I am sending my child to a school where he is taught positively certain things for a few hours a day, I may at a pinch guarantee his getting his religion and morals at home. But I cannot prevent his history being taught at the school, for history is regarded everywhere as part of the secular curriculum. And yet, upon what view of history he absorbs in youth depends a man's judgment of human life and of the community in which he will pass his days.
History is the memory of the State and at the same time the object-lesson of politics. It is by true history that men know what they really are. False history must make them think themselves different from what they really are. By history is the continuity of the State preserved and its character determined. Now history being of this supreme importance to philosophy, to one's whole outlook on life, and yet at the same time universally treated as a secular subject, you have meeting in it two issues, the conflict between which forms the great peril Catholics have to run in this country (England). History must have a philosophy. It must tend to praise or to blame. It must judge. There is no such thing as mere external history, for all history is the history of the human mind. Therefore, in anti-Catholic society history will be anti-Catholic. It will be anti-Catholic in the textbooks. It will be anti-Catholic in the examinations which Catholic youth has to pass. We are confronted in this country with the crucial difficulty of having to present the most important of human subjects, the one which, of temporal subjects, most affects the soul, with a machinery designed for the production of an anti-Catholic effect. . . .
Anti-Catholic Methods
First, let us examine in what way the anti-Catholic effect comes in. The great error of Catholics who would meet the opposing current is that they search out in the textbook which must use, the sentences maligning particular Catholic characters, times, doctrines, or false statements with regard to particular events. But such passages are rare and are not essential.
The essentials of anti-Catholic history, the things which make it all anti-Catholic, are, first, the anti-Catholic selection of material; second, what is called the anti-Catholic tone; and third, the anti-Catholic proportion observed in the presentation of historical fact. I would like, with your permission, to enlarge upon these three points which are capital to our subject.
First, as to selection. The telling of any story whatever is a matter of selection. If you select so that the truth sought is not revealed, then your selection, though every fact you present be true, is in its sum-total an untruth. What facts we choose to tell, and in what order, determine the picture we present.
Now, as to tone. I would like to emphasize in this matter of tone in history something which a good deal of detailed work has taught me but which, I think, is not sufficiently appreciated. It is this: tone or atmosphere in history is not a vague unseizable thing. It does not escape analysis. You can, if you will carefully go through a passage, exactly noting the adverbs and adjectives used, the type of verb also, and even, sometimes, the substantives, put your finger upon what gives the particular tone and say: "That was the way in which the lie was told."
Thirdly, proportion, the respective amount of space and weight given to various parts of your story, is the final element which determines the whole. It is not the same as selection. Two men may select the same dozen facts to relate and each relate them, yet arrange a very different proportion among them of length, emphasis and weight.
We are surrounded by an atmosphere of, and presented with the machinery of, anti-Catholic history; history which produces its anti-Catholic effect not so much by misstatement of fact—that is rare—as by anti-Catholic selection, anti-Catholic tone, and anti-Catholic proportion.
How to Meet Them
How are we to meet the evil? How are we to teach our Catholic youth true history, that is, Catholic history? For it behooves us to remember what in a Protestant country it is easy to forget: that the Catholic Church is not one of many opinions, but the truth. Its clergy are not part of the "clergy of all denominations," but the priests of God with Sacramental power. What it says definitely on any matter is not, to use the modern jargon, a "subjective" truth; it is an objective truth. It is not the presentation of something in the mind. It is the presentation of something that would go on being there though all human mind were destroyed. And truth supports truth, as untruth supports untruth. Catholic truth is not something stuck into general history like a pin into a pin-cushion. It is part of the universal truth. The same attitude which makes a man deny the morality of divorce and affirm the morality of private property will make him tell the truth about history, when he comes to write it, in matters apparently remote from Catholic doctrine.
There is a Catholic truth about the Conquest of England, or the War of the Roses, or the Frankish Monarchy in Gaul, quite as much as there is Catholic truth about the Manichean heresy or the nature of the Reformation. By this I do not mean that in these temporal matters, dependent upon positive evidence, there will not be differences in judgment among the most learned of Catholic authorities. But I do mean that a whole library of different and conflicting books written by Catholics and dealing with the history of Europe would be Catholic in nature and would teach Catholic history; and that a similar collection of books written by anti-Catholics, however much they differed among themselves, would be anti-Catholic in tendency and produce an anti-Catholic effect upon the reader, and, so far as they indoctrinated the reader, would be indoctrinating him in lies.
Antagonistic Textbooks
Our first difficulty is the lack of textbooks. Here we may note a very deplorable accident of the immediate past. Ever since modern accurate detailed history began, pretty nearly every textbook of note has been written in direct antagonism of the Faith. Of the mass of Protestant work that goes without saying. All the German Protestant work and all the English Protestant work is anti-Catholic. The man who waved his arm at the British Museum and said: "Books written by dons to attack the Church" was exaggerating, but there was something in what he said. It is no answer to this truth to say that many of the writers are what is called "fair" to the Catholic Church. You cannot be called "fair" to the truth. The truth is not one of two interesting antagonists around whom you have to keep a·ring. If you do not support it you cannot help attacking it. To talk of being "fair" to the Catholic Church in history is exactly parallel to talking of a judge being "neither partial on one side nor impartial on the other."
A Protestant historian is not to be commended, for instance, because he admits that many of the monasteries suppressed by Thomas Cromwell were well conducted. Rather is the Catholic historian to be commended who thoroughly exposes the ill-conduct of many of these monasteries, but who tells us what really happened. And what really happened was that the monastic institution was uprooted in England not because it had gone bad, nor because it was "outworn," not because it was unpopular, but because it was for the moment unfashionable in the smart intellectual world of that generation, because it was the chief defense of the Papacy and of unity of religion and, above all, because the King and the avaricious men who surrounded him wanted other people's goods. These three things combined explain that capital disaster in English history, the fiscal and territorial revolution of 1539. And if you do not put these three causes forward as the three great causes of the event, you are writing bad history.
It would be difficult to say why all the great textbooks since modern history began have been anti-Catholic, with the exception of Lingard, and even the great Lingard was influenced by the Protestant society in which he lived and for which he wrote. I can only connect so singular a phenomenon with the general story of Catholic academic work. The Church was, as it were, "taken aback" by the onslaught of skepticism in the eighteenth century. The French political system, the monarchy which was the chief defense of the Church, at that moment happened to be in decay, and when the storm blew that institution over, the scattered and defeated Catholic army of Europe took some time to rally. It did not really rally till our own time. There is also, probably, a large element of chance in the matter. Great historians are few, just as great poets are few.
At any rate, whatever the cause, there you have it. Every name you mention — Montesquieu, Mommsen, Michelet, Freeman, Stubbs, Treitschke, and a host of minor ones — tells the story of Europe and in my own country against the Church. The popular rhetorical historians do the same thing. The same is true of the dull and would-be accurate school-books. Green, who wrote for sale, leaves the innocent youth from whom he imposed under the impression that all history led up to a Divine climax—the Protestant society of his common room. And there may be (I have not read them) other later textbooks continuing the same tradition. The great compendiums, such as the "Oxford History," or the much superior Rambaud and Lavisse, are in the same boat.
Anti-Catholic History
G. K. Chesterton
The following theses were proposed for discussion by Mr. Chesterton at the recent Catholic Congress at Birmingham, England. Each thesis is followed by an illustrative example:
(1) Anti-Catholic history is false, not only in the light of our Faith, but in the light of the historical science to which that history has appealed.
e.g. We do not profess to prove that the Gospels are inspired, but the attempt to prove that they were late forgeries or fictions has been abandoned.
(2) Anti-Catholic history is most false and dangerous when it is not avowedly anti-Catholic.
e.g. Protestant pamphlets are less and less read, but newspapers and popular works of reference probably more read; and they perpetuate the bad history of fifty years ago.
(3) Anti-Catholic history fails because history is a story; and here it can never give the beginning of a story.
e.g. It has to begin with the Spanish Inquisition in existence and excess; it cannot tell how it came to be there without telling a heroic story of European struggle against Islam or Oriental pessimism. Nearly all our traditions, good or bad, were born Catholic, and the truth about their birth is concealed.
(4) Anti-Catholic history is generally superficial; it depends on certain particular catchwords, cases and names, while Catholic history can handle the whole texture of the truth.
e.g. Anybody who has heard the word "Galileo" can say "Galileo," even if he pronounces it wrong. But nobody who has read any ordinary indifferent mass of detail about the Middle Ages or the Renaissance can continue to believe that the Church discouraged science.
(5) Anti-Catholic history is also helped largely by legend, which may be natural and even healthy, but is not scientific.
e.g. It is legend to talk of the Elizabethan age as the unique triumph of emancipated England, on the strength of a real romance of sea-faring even more characteristic of Catholic Spain, and of one supreme poet who was almost certainly a Catholic.
(6) Anti-Catholic history constantly confesses an old error in launching a new one.
e.g. Fifty years ago a man like Mr. George Moore would deny that there was any evidence for a historical Jesus, and call him a Corn-Myth or a Sun-God. The moment a sceptic thinks of another way of evading the Resurrection—a way that allows him to treat Jesus as a historical character—he instantly treats him as a historical character.
(7) Anti-Catholic history is narrow and unimaginative, because it always conceives all men as looking forward to what did happen, instead of to the hundred things which might have happened, or which most of them wished to happen.
e.g. Anybody who may have differed from any Pope about anything (St. Francis, for instance) is made a morning star of the Reformation; though in fact the Fraticelli, who went further than St. Francis, were obviously going further and further away from the Reformation.
(8) Anti-Catholic history abounds in very casual remarks so false that they can only be contradicted by long and complicated statements.
e.g. Chambers's "Encyclopedia" speaks of "The Rosary, that somewhat mechanical devotion, which was employed by Dominic among the Albigenses." A Catholic might write pages about that; but he would at least have to say (a) The Rosary, like the Lord's Prayer, is as mechanical as you make it; (b) used with intensity, it is freer than the Lord's Prayer, consisting of individual meditation on infinite mysteries; (c) nobody would be such a fool as to use a merely mechanical thing to convert the Albigenses.
(9) Anti-Catholic history, in so far as it is Protestant, was a provincial misunderstanding of the high culture and even the intellectual liberty of Catholicism.
e.g. Protestants execrated the Jesuits for trying two hundred years ago to do in an orderly way what Protestants' problem novels and problem plays are now doing in an anarchical way; to show some sympathy in hard cases.
(10) Anti-Catholic history, in so far as it is atheist or agnostic, has been a series of sweeping but very depressing scientific theories or generalizations, each applied rigorously to everything and each abandoned abruptly in favor of the next.
e.g. Among these were the commercial and utilitarian theories of Bentham or of Buckle, the theories that referred everything to race, especially to the triumph of a Teutonic race, the economic theory of history of Marx and other materialists. There is probably another coming into fashion by this time.
(11) Anti-Catholic history, after bringing and dropping a thousand charges, after contradicting itself a thousand times, on the subject of the Catholic Church, has never yet guessed the simplest fact about the Church, that it stands for the whole truth against every kind of error.
e.g. The Church is always treated as necessarily the ritualist or the ascetic party in any dispute; though the Church has condemned countless forms of ritual and excesses of asceticism.
(12) Anti-Catholic history is obscurantist; it is afraid of the truth.
e.g. We can easily verify this statement by challenging any of the newspapers to the free discussion of any of these theses.
Twenty Historical "Don'ts"
James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
AS the discerning reader of the daily papers and of periodical literature is aware ignorance of Catholic history is still quite dense and widespread. Even well-meaning writers and speakers, when the Church is their theme, fall into grave errors, largely because their knowledge of history within the past few years is not "up-to-date." These men do not realize what remarkable advances have been made in the science of history within the past few years. As the editors of the "Cambridge Modern History" declare in the preface to that monumental work:
The long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given way. And competing historians all over the civilized world have been zealous to take advantage of the change. In view of this it has become impossible for an historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature . . . and has to hew his own way in order to reach the truth.
So it has seemed to the writer that possibly a little historical guide in the shape of a series of "Don'ts," warning editors and writers about certain popular historical fallacies, so often repeated that they seem to represent accepted truth, would be useful. Some years ago these handy "Don't" manuals used to be popular, notwithstanding the fact that human nature would much rather be told what to do than what not to do. Though couched in the imperative form, the following "Don'ts" are meant to warn even educated people, who may not be very familiar with recent historical research, from falling into absurd errors.
Don't write about "the long night of the Dark Ages." John Fiske speaks of "All the work big with promises of the future that went on in those centuries which modern writers in their ignorance used once to set apart and stigmatize as the 'Dark Ages.'" You do not want to be classed with the "modern writers" whom John Fiske thinks "ignorant."
Don't compare the Middle Ages with pagan antiquity to the great disadvantage of the medieval period, for John Fiske said that "There is a sense in which the most brilliant achievements of pagan antiquity are dwarfed in comparison with what was accomplished in the Middle Ages."
Don't accept the ordinary opinions about the Middle Ages unless you are sure you know a great deal about that period. John Fiske gives high praise to medieval times in the introduction to his work on "The Beginnings of New England, or the Puritan Theocracy in Its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty." If he said it there you can be sure that he must have had absolutely compelling evidence for it.
Don't talk about the Catholic Church "hampering education." In the thirteenth century, when the Catholic Church was most powerful, when the Popes for good reasons, were able to put kings down from their thrones, there were more students at the universities of Europe, in proportion to the population, than there are now. Read any serious history of the universities and see.
Don't proclaim confidently that there was no study of science until our time. The medieval universities were scientific universities, studying everything from the scientific aspect.
Don't write that all the university education before our time was founded on the classics. The classics came into education at the Renaissance. Before that the university curriculum consisted of physical and ethical science and philosophy.
Don't think that the medieval university study of science was trivial. Professor Huxley declared in his address as Rector of Aberdeen University, "I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture as this old trivium and quadrivium, the medieval university curriculum, does."
Don't talk about medieval ignorance, for if you turn to any history of the universities you will find that at the end of the thirteenth century there were more students at the universities of Europe and particularly of England, in proportion to the population of the various countries, than we have at the present time.
Don't talk about medieval superstitions being particularly "groveling," because superstition occurs at all times. Probably the lowest depths of superstition were reached in Europe at the height of the witchcraft craze at the end of the seventeenth century.
Don't laugh at medieval people for accepting the transmutation of metals. Many chemists now confidently expect to manufacture gold and silver out of lead and copper. They even say that the precious metals are being constantly manufactured in the midst of the baser ores throughout the radioactive energies that are present.
Don't talk too freely about all the harm that the Catholic Church did to mankind during the Middle Ages. John Fiske said in his introduction to "The Beginnings of New England": "It is hard to find words to express the debt of gratitude which modern civilization owes to the Roman Catholic Church." When John Fiske made that admission, rest assured that he knew whereof he spoke.
Don't talk about "lazy monks." They built the many hundreds of monasteries in England, drained the fens and raised the dignity of labor. The President of the Massachusetts Agricultural College declared that monasteries were the first agricultural schools.
Don't ever talk against the Jesuits until you know at least one of them. You can find them now in any American city of half a million inhabitants or so, and they are rather pleasant men to meet.
Don't talk about lack of initiative in the Middle Ages. Frederic Harrison said: "Of all the epochs of effort after a new life, that of the age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto and Dante, is the most purely spiritual, the most really constructive and, indeed, the most truly philosophic."
Don't forget that in recent years there has been serious discussion as to whether the thirteenth century may not have been the greatest century of human existence.
Don't scoff at the idea of a medieval century as the greatest until you have weighed Frederic Harrison's expression: "We find in this century (the thirteenth) a harmony of power, a universality of endowment, a glow, an aspiring ambition and confidence such as we never find in later centuries."
Don't brush aside the thought of the medieval period as quite unworthy of consideration in the history of humanity until you have read further what men like Fiske, Freeman, Frederic Harrison, Macaulay, Hallam and many others have written of it.
Don't talk about the failure of the Middle Ages to appreciate values properly. Our richest millionaires scarcely have money enough now to buy the things that medieval folk in little towns of less than 10,000 inhabitants made for themselves.
Don't be out of the fashion. It is fashionable now to talk about the Middle Ages as the "Bright Ages" because of all they did for art, architecture, education, literature, and above all, for the arts and crafts.
Don't suggest that the Middle Age was wrapped up in its own conceits. It made the most beautiful books, the most charming needlework, the finest illuminations, the most wonderful stained-glass windows that the world has ever known. We are just beginning to admire these things properly. It was when we had no interest in these things that we had no interest in the Middle Ages.
Second-Hand History
James J. Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
THERE is a prejudice against "second-hand" goods which the high cost of living has not lessened. The bother is that they are never as dependable as we hoped they would be. If people would only take that lesson to heart with regard to second-hand authorities and second-hand opinions as well as second-hand goods, the acquisition of real knowledge would be a simpler matter. Talk about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, it is nothing in riskiness to thinking that you know things when you do not. American editors are particularly prone to be confident in their assertions of knowledge that is dubious at best, but the flagrant example of cock-sureness with regard to things that are not so is Mr. Arthur Brisbane. What a lot of second-hand authorities on all sorts of subjects he has read and what a lot of them have proved to be quite as undependable as second-hand things generally are.
He is advertised as the highest paid editorial writer in the country. He ought to be able to get hold of some new first-hand authors. His editorials are a veritable joke book in their absolute assurance of expression just where the mysteries of things are the deepest. Lord Bryce's warning that in spite of all our advance in science "the mists that hang round man's origin and man's destiny are just as deep as they ever were" has no meaning apparently for Mr. Brisbane. He knows all about them. He is still in the "silly seventies," as they are well called, that period a decade or so after the publication of Darwin's book when a number of shallow scientists thought that evolution was just going to explain everything.
Occasionally Brisbane wanders into history. When he does so he is the greatest displayer of second-hand opinions left among us at the present time, that is of those who pretend to have any knowledge. "History lies" have proved such dangerous bombs to handle that most editors are somewhat careful about their historical authorities. But apparently Mr. Brisbane does not take it amiss that a historian is a little more than a generation behind the age. He has been accustomed to such "hand-me-down" opinions for so long that presumably he has not waked up as yet to the fact that historical fashions have changed very much, especially in the twentieth century. He seems to have read some books about forty years ago and, in spite of his constant preachment with regard to the wonderful progress of mankind, he has forgotten that history is very different now from what it used to be. The "Cambridge Modern History" at the beginning of the present century suggested that
Great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the past; the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has gradually given way, and competing historians all over the civilized world have been zealous to take advantage of the change. The printing of archives has kept pace with the admission of enquirers; and the total mass of new matter, which the last half-century has accumulated, amounts to many thousands of volumes. In view of changes and of gains such as these, it has become impossible for the historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities.
No wonder that the editors of the "Cambridge Modern History" emphatically insist that "the honest student finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature." If that is true for the classics what must be his wanderings consequent on dependence upon chance contributors to history who had theses to prove and collected only the material they thought would prove them?
I picked up a Boston paper the other day and found that Brisbane was still reading and recommending others to read such works as "The Intellectual Development of Europe," by Dr. John W. Draper, and Dr. Andrew D. White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom." The amusing thing for me about Professor Draper's book is that while he was teaching and acting as attending physician at Bellevue Hospital that hospital was a veritable disgrace to civilization. Its death-rate was woefully high; it was almost unbelievably dirty, and its nurses, as Stephen Smith tells us, and he is still alive, were the "ten-day women." A ten-day woman is a person who, having been drunk and disorderly or been arrested as a common scold, is sentenced by the magistrate to "ten days or ten dollars," and not having the ten dollars has to serve her ten days in the workhouse. In lieu of this she was, at one time, paroled, as it were, and allowed to serve thirty days in Bellevue as a nurse, provided she had had any experience in family nursing. No wonder the poor of New York dreaded hospitals and that that dread still lives among them to some extent.
Professor Draper was teaching at Bellevue, writing his book on the intellectual development of Europe, telling how unspeakably low the people were in the Middle Ages, yet he had no inkling of all that the medieval people had beautiful hospitals, some of the finest ever built, and magnificently trained nursing, and that they were doing surgery far ahead of any in his time. They were doing mighty little surgery at Bellevue in Dr. Draper's time, practically only emergency surgery, because the death-rate was so high from septic complications that they dared not. In the medieval hospitals they were doing operations for tumor and for abscess within the skull, and for all sorts of conditions within the abdomen. No surgeon at Bellevue in Draper's time would have dared to do such operations. They were wise, because their patients would have died. We have the text-books of the Middle Ages describing these operations and Draper knew nothing about them. He knew nothing about the intellectual development of Europe in his own profession. What possible worth can his opinions have with regard to the intellectual development of Europe in other departments, if he, a physician and a professor of medicine, was utterly ignorant, even about the intellectual course of his own dearest interests in the olden time?
I venture to say that if Draper had read some of these medieval surgical text-books (anyone who wants to know anything about the subject can readily get hold of them), and if he had found details of descriptions of beautiful hospitals in the medieval times, he either would not have understood what they meant or he would not have believed what they said. Our hospitals and surgery were so bad between 1860 and 1870 that to have stated that the medieval surgeons in medieval hospitals were "getting union by first intention" in wounds—the most favorable possible mode of healing—would have raised a laugh. It would have been literally incomprehensible. That very expression, "union by first intention," is a transfer of Latin terms to English words which mean nothing unless one knows the medieval Latin. Union by first intention would have seemed a myth in Draper's time, they knew almost nothing about it. They were deep in the delusion of laudable pus. Lord Lister brought us round to union by first intention again and now when we read the accounts of the medieval surgeons we know that they were anticipating our best work.
I recently wrote for the "Osler Memorial Volume," which was prepared for Sir William Osler's seventieth birthday, an account of the surgery of the Crusades. Old Ugo of Lucca who was on the fourth Crusade was one of the greatest surgeons of all time. He had the immense problem on his hands of caring for the hosts of wounded crusaders, and his heart was so deeply stirred that he succeeded in accomplishing results far ahead of his own time in saving life and securing the healing of wounds. His experience was written out by his son, who was a bishop, and came to be the foundation on which the great surgery of the great medieval universities was built up. We have the text-books of Roger and Roland of Salerno, of Bruno of Longoburgo, of Theodoric, the son of Ugo of Lucca, of William of Salicet, of Lanfranc of Paris, of Henri de Mondeville, of Guy de Chauliac of Montpellier, of whom Malgaigne in his "History of Surgery" said: "With the single exception of Hippocrates, there is no treatise on surgery, Greek, Latin or Arabic, which I place above or even on the same level with Chauliac's magnificent work." "It is a masterpiece," he adds, "of learned and luminous writing."
Of all this Dr. John Draper knew nothing but Dr. Andrew White knew almost, if it were possible, less. Dr. White was the first president of a university in this country who was not a clergyman. His appointment and the non-sectarian policy of Cornell aroused great opposition among the Protestant clergymen of this country. President White got back at them by having his secretary gather together all the references that could be found anywhere in historical writing of any kind, that could possibly be made to signify opposition between clergymen and scientists. He made a wonderful hodge-podge with some sense and a lot of nonsense in it. He suggested that the Church forbade dissection, just at the time when all the universities, though all under clerical control, began to practice dissection publicly. He said that the Popes were very much opposed to the progress of medicine, though the list of Papal physicians, that is, the men who were chosen by the Popes to be their personal attending physicians, represent the greatest list of names connected by any bond in the history of medicine. The Papal physicians, for instance, are greater as a body than the list of any faculty of any medical school in the world. This was, of course, because the Popes choose their physicians from the greatest men of each generation. Some of them came from Bologna, some from Padua, some from Naples, some from Montpelier, and, as a consequence, their names represent a list unsurpassed in the original contributions made to medicine.
When I pointed out some of these facts President White wrote me and confessed that there had been a mistake made with regard to anatomy and medicine, but that he was now too old a man to go into the subject again and that he hoped that the progress of the history of medicine would gradually set the whole subject right.
And here is Brisbane quoting Draper and White as confidently as if their books were not long since out of date and doing so in order to bolster up a theory of his by which apparently he hopes to foster disaffection between Christians and Jews. He declared in his editorial in the Boston Advertiser, which I suppose was published also in the various Hearst papers throughout the country, that "Jewish physicians traveled all over the world, studied and wrote learnedly on medicine and other sciences when Christianity's only cure for disease was a miracle." Or as he so editorially put it "while Christians taught that the first joint of the thumb was under the personal care of God and other parts of the body supervised by other Divine personages, Maimonides, Jewish physician to the Sultan Saladin, in Egypt, was writing " 'On Poisons and Antidotes.' "
What nonsense a man can write when he thinks he knows something about a subject but knows nothing about it, yet for that very reason is all the more ready to make confident assertions. There are a number of great Jewish physicians, but there is not a single century in the history of Christianity since the fifth during which there have not been great Christian physicians, some of whose works have come down to us to show us that men were thinking seriously about our medical problems and often anticipating some of our best thoughts with regard to them.
Dear Brisbane, do come out of the dark ages of the mid-nineteenth century when men—having the worst hospitals that ever were, the worst nursing ever thought of, the ugliest architecture ever imagined, when our American medical schools were granting a degree of Doctor in Medicine after two terms of four months each, and that degree was a license to practise medicine anywhere in the country, when the standards of our American universities were so low that no foreign university would recognize our degrees, when arts and crafts were almost unknown, when social conditions were the worst in history—were calmly talking about the Middle Ages as dark ages! History has in recent years revealed to us the wonderful triumphs the medieval people made in all those matters in which we failed. Having no architecture, no painting worth while talking about, no educational standards, ugly hospitals and bad surgery, we actually could not appreciate what they were doing in the Middle Ages and dared declare that they must be doing nothing because they were doing something so different from anything that we were doing. Now we know better. We are imitating their architecture, humbly studying their painting, redeveloping their surgery, renewing their anesthesia, emulating their hospitals and beginning to solve social problems as they did. It is time for men whose opinions are still in the dark ages of the benighted nineteenth century to wake up and learn something of all that has been revealed to us about the wonderful Middle Ages.