We shall consider their intellectual labors in the order of their importance and service to human-kind, and for that reason we shall begin with a hasty review of their progress in medical science. In this branch the Jew was without peer. He excelled the Moor, because the restrictions which Islamism imposed upon the follower of the Koran, such as prohibitions against dissecting man or animal, did not trammel him. And he eclipsed the Christian, for the Church held medical science accursed, branded and condemned the physician as an atheist, and zealously propagated the doctrines that cures must be wrought by relics of martyrs and bones of saints; by prayer and intercession; that each region of the body was under special spiritual charge, the first joint of the right thumb being in care of God the father, the second under that of the blessed Virgin, and so on to the other parts. For each disease there was a saint. A man with sore eyes must invoke St. Clara. St. Anthony is a sure cure for other inflammations, St. Pernel delivers from ague. In all cases, cured or not, the clergy constituted themselves as the self-appointed agents for collecting the fees for the saints, and as long as this spiritual method of curing disease formed one of their most productive sources of gain, they took great care that no other mode of treatment should excel theirs. Hence their attitude against physicians, and their frequent council decrees, making it a crime punishable with death for a Jewish physician to attend a Christian patient, and for a Christian patient to seek recourse to a Jewish physician, instead of to the shrines and altars of the saints.[19] But for all that, Jewish physicians, and Jewish medical schools flourished, and found their prohibited profession very profitable among the Christians, especially among kings, and popes, and princes, and bishops, among the very men, who passed the sentence of death for crimes which they were the first to perpetrate. [19] Council of Beziers, 1246 A. C.; Council of Alby, 1254: Faculty of Paris, 1301. In the tenth and eleventh and twelfth centuries, nearly all the physicians in Europe were Jews. Later, the Moors joined them, but only for a short time, and then the Jews again became the sole champions of medical science. There was not a man of power or prominence who had not his own Jewish body physician, and these body physicians constituted a power, for besides holding the lives of potentates in their hand, they combined with their professional skill, all the learning of the age, a profound knowledge of theology, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, music, law, statesmanship, poetry, lexicography, criticism, and of other branches.