A local professor of the healing art is Maître Denis, the executioner. Since he knows so well how to mutilate bodies, he ought to be able to understand the converse process of curing them. He has wide reputation as a healer of broken bones, and he often sells his patients a panacea for multifarious ills--"the fat of a man just hung." There is at least this to be said for the peasants: the science of _their_ healers will agree almost as much with that of later physicians as does that of the contemporary "physicians" themselves. The Church has not given any too great encouragement to medicine. The mighty St. Ambrose has said that the proper healing is by prayers and vigils. Only clerics of the inferior orders are allowed to study medical science, and the dissection of dead bodies is decidedly discountenanced.[82] At the castle the ordinary functionary to abate bodily ills is Maître Louis, the baron's barber. When not scraping chins, he was very likely giving the castle folk their monthly bleedings, without which it is very hard to keep one's health. The bleedings take place, if possible, in the great hall near the fire, and are undergone regularly by both sexes. When the St. Aliquis forces are called to war, Maître Louis goes with them as barber-surgeon, and he really has considerable skill in setting fractures and cauterizing and salving wounds, as well as with a few powerful drugs--mostly purgatives--which probably help those of his patients who have the strongest constitutions to recover. [Sidenote: Professional Physicians] When one of the baron's own family is seriously sick, it is usual to send to Pontdebois for a professional physician. About two years ago Conon himself fell into a fever. They brought to him Maître Payen, who claimed to have learned his art as _mire_ by travel among the schools of medicine--at Salerno in Sicily, at Montpellier in the Languedoc country, and even at Cordova among the Infidels, although the baron swore angrily (after he was gone) that he had never been nearer any of these places than Paris. [Illustration: A THIRTEENTH-CENTURY DOCTOR Restored by Viollet-Le-Duc, from a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale.]