The Church authorities, enforcing the spirit of the time, were especially severe against these benefactors: that men who openly rejected the means of salvation, and whose souls were undeniably lost, should heal the elect seemed an insult to Providence; preaching friars denounced them from the pulpit, and the rulers in state and church, while frequently secretly consulting them, openly proscribed them.
Gregory of Tours tells us of an archdeacon who, having been partially cured of disease of the eyes by St.Martin, sought further aid from a Jewish physician, with the result that neither the saint nor the Jew could help him afterward.

Popes Eugene IV, Nicholas V, and Calixtus III especially forbade Christians to employ them.

The Trullanean Council in the eighth century, the Councils of Beziers and Alby in the thirteenth, the Councils of Avignon and Salamanca in the fourteenth, the Synod of Bamberg and the Bishop of Passau in the fifteenth, the Council of Avignon in the sixteenth, with many others, expressly forbade the faithful to call Jewish physicians or surgeons; such great preachers as John Geiler and John Herolt thundered from the pulpit against them and all who consulted them.

As late as the middle of the seventeenth century, when the City Council of Hall, in Wurtemberg, gave some privileges to a Jewish physician "on account of his admirable experience and skill," the clergy of the city joined in a protest, declaring that "it were better to die with Christ than to be cured by a Jew doctor aided by the devil." Still, in their extremity, bishops, cardinals, kings, and even popes, insisted on calling in physicians of the hated race.( 316) (316) For the general subject of the influence of theological idea upon medicine, see Fort, History of Medical Economy during the Middle Ages, New York, 1883, chaps.

xiii and xviii; also Colin de Plancy, Dictionnaire des Reliques, passim; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation francaise, Paris, 1885, vol.i, chap.