Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

Medicine provides other examples of the Christian closing of the western mind. The Greeks had not been especially successful in finding cures for illnesses but they had introduced the method of observation of symptoms, and the idea that illness was a natural process. In the second century AD, in Rome, the great physician Galen had argued that a supreme god had created the body ‘with a purpose to which all its parts tended’.16 This fitted Christian thinking so completely that, around 500, Galen’s writings were collected into sixteen volumes and served as canonical medical texts for a thousand years. It marked the abandonment of the scientific approach in favour of magic and miracles. Sacred springs and shrines were now invoked as cures, the plague was understood as ‘sent by God’ as a punishment, with medieval paintings in Italy still showing pestilence as being delivered from God through arrows, as had originally been the case with Apollo, more than a thousand years before in Homer’s world. Hippocrates had described epilepsy as a natural illness; as late as the fourteenth century, John of Gaddesden, an English physician, recommended that the malady could be cured by the reading of the Gospel over the epileptic while simultaneously placing on him the hair of a white dog. This approach was summed up most succinctly by John Chrysostom, a keen disciple of Paul. ‘Restrain our own reasoning, and empty our mind of secular learning, in order to provide a mind swept clear for the re...