The nominal hostility of the Church to the shedding of blood withdrew, as we have seen, from surgical practice the great body of her educated men; hence surgery remained down to the fifteenth century a despised profession, its practice continued largely in the hands of charlatans, and down to a very recent period the name "barber-surgeon" was a survival of this.

In such surgery, the application of various ordures relieved fractures; the touch of the hangman cured sprains; the breath of a donkey expelled poison; friction with a dead man's tooth cured toothache.( 310) (310) On the low estate of surgery during the Middle Ages, see the histories of medicine already cited, and especially Kotelmann, Gesundheitspflege im Mittelalter, Hamburg, 1890, pp.

216 et seq.
The enormous development of miracle and fetich cures in the Church continued during century after century, and here probably lay the main causes of hostility between the Church on the one hand and the better sort of physicians on the other; namely, in the fact that the Church supposed herself in possession of something far better than scientific methods in medicine.

Under the sway of this belief a natural and laudable veneration for the relics of Christian martyrs was developed more and more into pure fetichism.
Thus the water in which a single hair of a saint had been dipped was used as a purgative; water in which St.Remy's ring had been dipped cured fevers; wine in which the bones of a saint had been dipped cured lunacy; oil from a lamp burning before the tomb of St.Gall cured tumours; St.Valentine cured epilepsy; St.Christopher, throat diseases; St.Eutropius, dropsy; St.Ovid, deafness; St.Gervase, rheumatism; St.
Apollonia, toothache; St.Vitus, St.Anthony, and a multitude of other saints, the maladies which bear their names.

Even as late as 1784 we find certain authorities in Bavaria ordering that any one bitten by a mad dog shall at once put up prayers at the shrine of St.Hubert, and not waste his time in any attempts at medical or surgical cure.( 311) In the twelfth century we find a noted cure attempted by causing the invalid to drink water in which St.Bernard had washed his hands.
Flowers which had rested on the tomb of a saint, when steeped in water, were supposed to be especially efficacious in various diseases.