Thus we must admit that the ancient physicians were by no means below the standard of civilization and culture attained during their period if they believed in the possibility of extraordinary cures effected by means extraneous and unscientific in their treatment of the sick, and, accordingly, they supported such methods. However, this belief in miraculous medicines on the part of the ancient physician was always restricted to certain limits. It is true, the conception was always adhered to that this or that magical agency, or this or that magical action, might exert an influence upon the disease; but such a belief never led them to omit any strictly medical measures of a surgical or gynecological nature. On the contrary, the intelligent physicians of antiquity firmly insisted that the actions of the surgeon and of the gynecologist were not to be hampered by any metaphysical considerations; thus, for instance, Soranus demanded most energetically that the midwife should be “ἀδεισιδαίμων” (without fear of any demon)—_i.e._, she was not to be superstitious, but free from any imputation which would render her curative interposition objectionable. The profession of the magicians, due to the persecutions to which they became subject under the Christian emperors Valens, Valentinian, and Theodosius, became considerably less prominent during the predominance of Christianity, but the ideas upon which it had been erected in ancient times still survived; in fact, these ideas were even to a certain extent systematically elaborated during the middle ages, and at this time a distinction was made between higher and lower, or white and black, magic. The white magic busied itself with good spirits, the black magic with the bad ones. Magicians, therefore, who operated by the aid of the devil, and even in medicine called in the assistance of the devil, were called “necromancers.” For the first time magic became amalgamated with certain philosophical speculations and also with Christian-dogmatic constituents. The methods adopted by magic medicine under these conditions are so peculiar and are so close to the boundary lines between philosophy and religion that we are really not quite certain whether to relegate it to the domain of one or of the other. But as the fundamental parts of these methods were actually supplied by philosophy, we propose to defer this discussion for the present, and to take up here another form of medical superstition which was derived exclusively from religion—namely, “sleep in the temple.”