Medicine is indebted for its advancement to the Hebraic religion to a greater extent than is generally believed. In the early Christian centuries there existed three great creeds: the Christian, Hebraic, and Mohammedan. The Christian Church was in a perplexing condition. As observed by Draper,[52] it was impossible to disentangle her from the principles which had, at the beginning, entered into her political organization. For good or evil, right or wrong, her necessity required that she should put herself forth as the possessor of all knowledge within the reach of the human intellect. But the monk and priest were prohibited from studying medicine,[53] as by so doing the church saw that she would have to relinquish the spiritual control of disease were medicine a matter of scientific research; she preferred to hold on to her spiritual dominion, and let science slumber in darkness. On the other hand, the Mohammedans, recognizing the principle of fatalism in their religion, it was not to be expected that they should cultivate an art entirely opposed to that principle. In this state of affairs the Jewish physician, led by the teachings of his religion, alone presented the study of medicine in a scientific manner, and its practice and its result taught the Moslems that medical science placed it within the power of man to keep himself out of the grave, when either assailed by disease or laid low by the wounds of war. The Arabs were not slow to avail themselves of this discovery; and to the learning and skill of the Jewish physician, guided by the light of an intelligent Deity and a liberal religion, does medicine owe the existence of those able and learned Arabian physicians that flourished during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
There has been more or less of fault-finding in regard to certain rules and ordinances being sacramental, which, from the nature of things, should have been merely advisory or suggestive, as they pertained more to the hygienic welfare of the people than to the spiritual. Thus to reason, is neither philosophical nor in concert with our knowledge of the structure of man, and of the intimate relations that exist between mind and body, or of good health and good morals. The writer has seen violent catharsis produced by bread pills, after podophyllin, castor-oil, and phosphate of soda in the most generousdoses--administered as one would drop a letter in a mail-box--had completely failed; it is all in the manner and way we give a medicine or treat a disease. Certain narcotic and irritant poisons or powerful sedative agents have a physical action uninfluenced by the mind, but an intelligent physician is hardly supposed to drive at the small tack of disease with such powerful sledge-hammers. Charcot, recognizing the power of and availing himself of such a remedial agent as the pilgrimages to the Notre Dame de Lourdes, is an evidence of the intelligent and enlightened practitioner, who has learned, what the Bible taught, long, long ago, that human nature must be taken as it is found, and that, like the homely saying of Mohammed, as the mountain would not come to him, he must go to the mountain. Moses and all the Scriptural writers were well aware of this state of affairs, and their manner of using their knowledge was adapted and timed to the general intellectual development of the times.