ability to do work. When they made captives-which they did by the thousand-the price they put upon the slave depended upon his strength and skill in mechanics. A smith

sold high, a lawyer very low. It is rather remarkable, however, that a physician brought a handsome sum. These barbarians, in their ignorance, rated the usefulness of the medical men of the civilized States they overran at a much higher rate than has been common since, or probably than was deserved. "The barbarians, who despised death, might be apprehensive of disease; and the haughty conqueror trembled in the presence of his captive, to whom he ascribed, perhaps, an imaginary power of prolonging or preserving his life." This recalls the incident in the history of Darius which we recounted, on the authority of Herodotus, in the first chapter.

Although, in their ignorant credulity, the Goths, the Vandals, the Huns, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Lombards, and the other tribes and nations which successively occupied the fragments of the Roman world which they broke in pieces, might occasionally, and with the uncertainty and caprice of barbarians, lavish rewards upon their medical captives; yet it is plain that medicine, as an art and science, must have been simply non-existent among them; for they had for its cultivation neither time, taste, nor opportunity. So long as they were an army of invasion, they were held together by common danger; but when they became an army of occupation, then the feeble bond of military allegiance was dissolved, and society was reduced to its primitive elements, every man defending himself and not recognizing any obligation to the public welfare. In speaking of the Franks after they had settled in France, Gregory of Tours2 says:-"No one any longer respects his king, his duke, or his count; each man loves to do evil, and freely indulges

Gibbon, Vol. VI., p. 59.

2 L. VIII., c. 30, in Tom. II., pp.

325, 326. Quoted by Gibbon, Vol. VI., p. 374.

his criminal inclinations. vokes an immediate tumult, and the rash magistrate who presumes to censure or restrain his seditious subjects, seldom escapes alive from their revenge." This was the condition of things about 540. No doubt, for a time, under the vigorous administration of Charlemagne, there was much more central authority and restraint; but how completely this depended upon the action of his own great mind in reducing to order the elementary confusion of the times into which he was thrown, is illustrated by the rapid dissolution of his empire within half a century after his death. From that period till the final settlement of the German Empire under Otho I., about the middle of the tenth century, there was little else than anarchy discernible in Europe. No wonder that the arts of peace should have sought a refuge from the perpetual strife that characterized these ages, far away in the remote kingdom of Bokhara, or in the cloisters of the monastery, which the religious feeling of the age protected from the invasion of the soldier.

The most gentle correction pro

When there was no law of sufficient force to protect the weak and restrain the strong, the feudal system arose. This is the first step out of absolute anarchy. It divides a kingdom into an infinite number of minute States-what we might call state-molecules-each consisting of a castle occupied by a successful warrior, who secures the service of his retainers to fight with him against his neighbours, at the price of protecting them in their turn from all violence, except his own. It is fundamentally opposed to the idea of law as a power from above, in whose eyes the great and the small are on a level of absolute equality. By the universal conscience of humanity, the murder of a fellow-creature is a crime of the greatest enormity. The Sixth Commandment is the one of all most readily admitted to be of Divine authority. Let us see how the

We call

Christian Franks interpreted this ordinance. them Christian, because they had embraced Christianity; but if the anecdote told of the way in which their first leader, Clovis, was converted, be true, and if his notions of Christian duty were shared by his followers, the appellation is hardly merited. Clovis was married to Clotilda, niece of the King of Burgundy. In the distress of the battle of Tolbiac, he invoked to his aid the God of Clotilda and the Christians; and having gained the day, he made a public profession of Christianity, and had its doctrines explained to him. When the priest entrusted with the duty dwelt with pathetic earnestness upon the death and sufferings of Christ, the royal neophyte exclaimed, "Had I been present at the head of my valiant Franks, I would have revenged his injuries! His zeal against heresy was so strong, that before he marched to the conquest of Gaul, he issued the following proclamation :-"It grieves me to see that the Arians still possess the fairest portion of Gaul. Let us march against them with the aid of God! and, having vanquished the heretics, we will possess and divide their fertile provinces.' Such is a fair specimen of the kind of Christianity which animated the Franks, and we shall now see how it affected their criminal code.

"2

In the eye of the law, all freemen are equal; it is as great an affront to its majesty to slay the poorest and feeblest, as the most influential of its subjects. The Franks, however, had a graduated scale, according to which different lives had each its particular value apportioned. A man of the highest rank was rated at six hundred pieces of gold; a noble of lesser account might be legally murdered for three hundred; while a common Roman (for to this baseness had that long-dreaded name come down), might be knocked on the head for fifty. What the upset price

1 Gibbon, Vol. VI., p. 320.

2 Gregory of Tours, L. II., c. 37, in

Tom. II., p. 181. Quoted by Gibbon.

3 Gibbon, Vol. VI., p. 348.

of a physician was, we are not informed, but we may be sure, that unless these lawless soldiers were restrained by personal fears or superstition, they would think as little of putting their medical attendant to death, as of hanging a cat. Indeed, we have an historical illustration of it. In the year 565, the Queen of Burgundy died of the plague, as most people did at that time. Her most Christian Majesty, to exhibit her perfect acquaintance with the Gospel of the forgiveness of injuries, asked her husband, King Guntrum, as her dying request, to put her physician to death, for not being sufficiently attentive to her. This pious wish the royal widower punctually fulfilled, after the obsequies of the deceased queen had been performed according to the ritual of the Christian Church.'

2

We cannot more effectually delineate the state of medicine at this period, than by quoting one of the laws by which its practice was restrained, and which were in general force over Europe till the eleventh century. "If a physician injure a nobleman by blood-letting, he shall pay a fine of a hundred solidos; but if the nobleman die after the operation, the physician shall be given up to his relatives, to do with him what they please!" They might impale, flay, or crucify him, without a word of remonstrance from public law or opinion. From this point there can be no further descent for medicine in the social scale; and before we proceed to inquire into the technical development of the art at this period, we may repeat the observation forced upon our attention in every page of history, that the feudal system was essentially the power of the sword, as opposed to the power of the law; and it is, we may add, the prolongation of this antiquated and unchristian institution into modern civilization, which has displaced the medical art

Gregory of Tours. Quoted by Sprengel, Vol. II., p. 274.

2 Lindenbrog, Col. Legg. Antiq.

Wisogoth, lit. 1., p. 204. Quoted by Sprengel, Vol. II., p. 483.

from the lofty position it held among the refined Athenians, who considered it a disgrace to be seen with weapons on their persons, except on a field of battle.

If we confine the term technical in medicine, to the administration of medicine, the whole of the period we are now surveying is represented by one nameDIOSCORIDES. What Galen was to the art as a whole, to its theories and practice, Dioscorides was to its Materia Medica. For more than fifteen hundred years his was the only work upon the subject held as an authority; and Dioscorides was no less slavishly copied in his department, than was Galen servilely obeyed in the other branches of the art of medicine. It was the fashion to find everything in Dioscorides. It was a firm belief, as late as the sixteenth century, that not a plant grew in Germany, France, or England, which had not been described by Dioscorides. Even when potatoes were introduced into Europe, the learned found no difficulty in discovering them in Dioscorides. Dioscorides is supposed to have lived in the first century of the Christian era. He was a Cilician by birth, and wrote in corrupt Greek, which had this great advantage over a pure idiom, that it was impossible to fix with certainty the exact meaning of many phrases. This gives a latitude to the interpretation without which the book would have been deficient in the requisite elasticity. The ambiguity of the language was improved by rude delineations of the plants described; and between the two, we can easily understand that there could be no possible difficulty in recognizing the likeness of the potato, tea, tobacco, coffee, or any other plant, from the hyssop of the wall to the cedar of Lebanon. The book is in the form of a dictionary, arranged according to the order of the Greek alphabet; and, under the initial letter, we have first the different names of the plant, then a description of its appearance, and lastly, its medicinal uses. In the last