The Popes and Science

"The only reason why government did not suffer dry rot in the Middle Ages under the aristocratic systems which then prevailed, was that the men who were efficient instruments of government were drawn from the Church–from that great Church, that body we now distinguish from other Church bodies as the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church then, as now, was a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become a Pope of Christendom, and every chancellory in Europe was ruled by those learned, trained and accomplished men–the priesthood of that great and then dominant Church; and so, what kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the Roman Catholic priesthood."

The greatest surprise is to be found in Professor Draper's ignorance of the history of his own profession. He says, "It had always been the policy of the Church to discourage the physician and his art; he interfered too much with the gifts and profits of the shrines." Professor Draper apparently knew nothing of the magnificent medical schools attached to the universities in the medieval period, whose professors wrote great medical and surgical text-books, which have come down to us, and whose faculties required a far higher standard of medical education than was demanded in America in Professor Draper's own day. For about 1871 anyone who wished might enter an American medical school practically anywhere in the country, without any preliminary education, and having taken two terms of ungraded lectures, that is, having listened to the same set of lectures two years in succession, might receive his degree of doctor of medicine. In the Middle Ages he could enter the medical school only after having completed three years of preliminary work in the undergraduate department, and then he was required to give four years to the study of medicine, and spend a year as assistant with another physician before he was allowed to practise for himself. This is the standard to which our university medical schools gradually climbed back at the beginning of the twentieth century–a full generation after Draper's time.

We know now that in those earlier centuries they had thorough clinical teaching in the hospitals, that is, physicians learned to practise medicine at the bedside of the patient, and not merely out of books and by theoretic lectures. Clinical teaching had not developed in Professor Draper's day to any extent. The medieval hospitals had trained nurses and magnificent quarters, while the trained nurse was only introduced into America in 1871, and our hospitals at that time were almost without exception a disgrace to civilization, according to our present standards of hospital construction. Our surgery was most discouraging, because there were so many deaths in the unclean hospital conditions. The medieval hospital surgeons operating under anesthesia, boasted of getting union by first intention, and were in many ways doing better work than their colleagues of 1870, Professor Draper's own time, before Lister's great discovery. Of all this Professor Draper had no inkling.

Draper's position is very like that of the specialist at all times. Dean West of Princeton once said, I believe, that a specialist is a man who knows so much more about one thing than he knows about anything else that he is inclined to think that he knows more about that than anyone else does. To which I once ventured to add that the specialist is also a man who thinks because of his recognized attainments in one line, that if, for any reason, he should pay any serious attention to any other subject he would know more about that than anyone else does. Draper's views on universal history correspond exactly to such a definition. He jumped to conclusions in a way that he would surely have resented most bitterly and quite properly in anyone who attempted after slight acquaintance with his own department of science to express ultimate conclusions with regard to it, but he himself with the most scanty information gleaned only for the purpose of confirming some preconceived ideas, gathered entirely from secondary authorities without even an attempt to confirm his views by consultation of original documents, proceeded to tell the world just what it ought to think about questions of all kinds that have sometimes occupied historians for centuries and are by no means clear even yet.

Above all, he failed to realize the relations of whatever knowledge he had to the other facts of history. Deeply interested in science himself to the exclusion of nearly everything else, he could not understand how any generation and scarcely how any individual could live a deeply intellectual life without an absorbing interest in physical science. He seems to have had no conception of the fact that physical science is only a passing phase of man's interest, and that interests in philosophy, in art, in poetry, in literature are not only quite equal to science as a mental discipline, but must probably be considered to surpass it. Nothing can be so narrow as physical science pursued alone,–as Draper himself furnishes the best possible proof, but of this he seems to have had no hint. Fortunately humanity has drawn away from that exaggerated idea of the value of physical science as ultimate truth and we are able to judge a little more dispassionately.

Professor Draper's prestige, and the fact that his book was published in the International Scientific Series, led a great many people to read it, and it found its way into many of the public libraries of the country, on whose shelves it may still be found. Many of its readers thought it could never be effectively answered. Scientists were affected by it, or at least those interested in science, and it represented one phase of that pronounced opposition to religion which characterized what has been so well called the "silly seventies."

And if the seriously educated were willing to accept the ignorant and prejudiced views of Professor Draper, what was to be expected of the general reader? What has helped the position of the Church in this country during the past generations is knowledge, and ever more knowledge. When those who are not of the fold know even a little of the history of the Church, know a reasonable amount of the other side of controversial problems, and, above all, when they have been brought into personal touch with the Church itself, her pastors and the hierarchy and religious men and women, prejudice disappears and understanding grows. We still have the monks and nuns of the olden time with us, but no one who knows them personally ever thinks for a moment of lazy monks and idle nuns. After a man has met scholarly Catholic clergymen, he has quite a different view of the relations of the Church to education. That is all that the Church has ever needed–to be known in order to be appreciated. Nothing emphasizes this so much as the change that has come over the opinions of those outside the Church as a result of growth in knowledge of the Church and her institutions during the generation that separates us from the writing of Professor Draper's book.