Note 6 — THE PHYSICIANS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

In the Miracles de Saint Louis we find the history of a cure effected through the royal touch. This cure affords an illustration of how the monks wrote medicine in the thirteenth century. The disease resulted in this patient from white swelling of the left knee. The following is the veracious chronicle:

“About the year of Our Savior 1174, before the Feast of St. Andre, one Jehan Dugue of the town of Combreus, in the Diocese of Orleans, was attacked by inflammation of the left leg near the knee. Several openings were observable in the flesh, which was soft and rotten above and below the joint.”