Among the Continental students the revels and bad behavior of past centuries were not to any great extent corrected; fights and debauchery were very common, and all sorts of orgies and bacchanals prevailed. The professors were, in large measure, independent of the State, and a single{ 233} individual often represented a number of branches now taught by special chairs. When indisposed to lecture, they simply posted upon the blackboard: "_Hodie non legitur_," and this was the end of the matter. In 1777 Vienna had one hundred and forty-seven medical teachers, and in Germany there were two to every thirty-nine students. That in the last century one man often accomplished more than a great number of average teachers do to-day is amply demonstrated by the lives of Boerhaave, Haller, and others. Then, too, the Latin tongue was generally employed for purposes of instruction, though surgeons, for the most part, lectured in the vernacular; Cullen, in 1770, was the first in Great Britain to deliver purely medical lectures in English; and as the clergy gradually retired from the ranks of the profession, Latin more and more fell into disuse. Strange to say, as the clerical influence waned, the Jews began to enter medicine, the movement beginning about 1791, in France, under the promulgation of "civil equality" ideas; previously the Hebrews had been an almost universally suppressed people, and in Berlin were permitted to enter and leave the city by only one gate, and were forbidden to learn or write pure German, in consequence whereof their dialect was an Hebraic-Teutonic jargon, that even to-day prevails in some portions of western Europe. Educated Jews were few in number, since attendance upon universities was ordinarily denied them, although long before they had been admitted at Salamanca, Toledo, Salernum, and Montpellier. In Austria the prohibition was not removed until 1789, and even then, so bitter was the prejudice against the Semitic race, the clergy vigorously protested. It was the same clerical body that, in 1667, protested with the greatest vehemence against allowing Hebrew physicians to pass through the gates of Wurtemburg without paying toll, declaring that it was "better to die with Christ than be cured by Jews, who were aided by the devil."