For a perfectly just statement of the only circumstances which can justify a charge of atheism, see Rev.Dr.Deems, in Popular Science Monthly, February, 1876.
The effect of this widespread ecclesiastical opposition was, that for many centuries the study of medicine was relegated mainly to the lowest order of practitioners.

There was, indeed, one orthodox line of medical evolution during the later Middle Ages: St.Thomas Aquinas insisted that the forces of the body are independent of its physical organization, and that therefore these forces are to be studied by the scholastic philosophy and the theological method, instead of by researches into the structure of the body; as a result of this, mingled with survivals of various pagan superstitions, we have in anatomy and physiology such doctrines as the increase and decrease of the brain with the phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of human vitality with the tides of the ocean, the use of the lungs to fan the heart, the function of the liver as the seat of love, and that of the spleen as the centre of wit.
Closely connected with these methods of thought was the doctrine of signatures.

It was reasoned that the Almighty must have set his sign upon the various means of curing disease which he has provided: hence it was held that bloodroot, on account of its red juice, is good for the blood; liverwort, having a leaf like the liver, cures diseases of the liver; eyebright, being marked with a spot like an eye, cures diseases of the eyes; celandine, having a yellow juice, cures jaundice; bugloss, resembling a snake's head, cures snakebite; red flannel, looking like blood, cures blood-taints, and therefore rheumatism; bear's grease, being taken from an animal thickly covered with hair, is recommended to persons fearing baldness.( 308) (308) For a summary of the superstitions which arose under the theological doctrine of signatures, see Dr.Eccles's admirable little tract on the Evolution of Medical Science, p.

140; see also Scoffern, Science and Folk Lore, p.

76.
Still another method evolved by this theological pseudoscience was that of disgusting the demon with the body which he tormented--hence the patient was made to swallow or apply to himself various unspeakable ordures, with such medicines as the livers of toads, the blood of frogs and rats, fibres of the hangman's rope, and ointment made from the body of gibbeted criminals.