Читать книгу Medicine in the Middle Ages. Extracts from "Le Moyen Age Medical" by Dr. Edmond Dupouy; translated by T. C. Minor онлайн

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An ephemeral ray of light broke from the clouds in the renaissance of 805, when Charlemagne ordered the cathedral schools to add medicine to their studies as a part of the quadrivium. Some of the monks now commenced to study the works of Celsus and Cœlius Aurelianus, but, ever as with the Mussulmen, the Catholic religion forbade the dissection of the human body, and the monks made no more progress than the barbarians; so that the masses of the people had little or no confidence in clerical medical skill. We find the proof of a lack of confidence in the Gothic laws promulgated by Theodoric about this period—laws kept even into the eleventh century in the greater portion of Western Europe. These ordinances, among other things, proclaim as follows:

“No physician must open a vein of a woman or a daughter of the nobility without being assisted by a relative or body-servant; quia difficillium non est, ut sub tali occasione ludibrium interdum adhærescat.” (Their morality was then a subject for caution.)