(Dannemann, Die Naturw., I, p.

214.) The attitude of the early Fathers toward the body is well expressed by Jerome.

"Does your skin roughen without baths?
Who is once washed in the blood of Christ needs not wash again." In this unfavorable medium for its growth, science was simply disregarded, not in any hostile spirit, but as unnecessary.( 2) And a third contributing factor was the plague of the sixth century, which desolated the whole Roman world.

On the top of the grand mausoleum of Hadrian, visitors at Rome see the figure of a gilded angel with a drawn sword, from which the present name of the Castle of St.Angelo takes its origin.

On the twenty-fifth of April, 590, there set out from the Church of SS.
Cosmas and Damian, already the Roman patron saints of medicine, a vast procession, led by St.Gregory the Great, chanting a seven-fold litany of intercession against the plague.