anthropology. The literal interpretation of the Bible involved the truth
that the sun revolves round the earth. The Church condemned the theory
of the antipodes. One of the charges against Servetus (who was burned in
the sixteenth century; see below, p. 79) was that he believed the
statement of a Greek geographer that Judea is a wretched barren country
in spite of the fact that the Bible describes it as a land flowing with
milk and honey. The Greek physician Hippocrates had based the study of
medicine and disease on experience and methodical research. In the
Middle Ages men relapsed to the primitive notions of a barbarous age.
Bodily ailments were ascribed to occult agencies—the malice of the Devil
or the wrath of God. St. Augustine said that the diseases of Christians
were caused by demons,

[65] and Luther in the same way attributed them to Satan. It was only
logical that supernatural remedies should be sought to counteract the
effects of supernatural causes. There was an immense traffic in relics
with miraculous virtues, and this had the advantage of bringing in a
large revenue to the Church. Physicians were often exposed to suspicions
of sorcery and unbelief. Anatomy was forbidden, partly perhaps on
account of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The opposition
of ecclesiastics to inoculation in the eighteenth century was a survival
of the mediaeval view of disease. Chemistry (alchemy) was considered a
diabolical art and in 1317 was condemned by the Pope. The long
imprisonment of Roger Bacon (thirteenth century) who, while he professed
zeal for orthodoxy, had an inconvenient instinct for scientific
research, illustrates the mediaeval distrust of science.

It is possible that the knowledge of nature would have progressed
little, even if this distrust of science on theological grounds had not
prevailed. For Greek science had ceased to advance five hundred years