But conditions were to become much worse. When, about the thirteenth century, scholasticism had usurped full control of human reason, and all sciences were permitted to be pursued only in a scholastic sense, medicine was entirely divorced from the actual conditions of life. It was completely detached from nature, its great teacher, and irretrievably entangled in the subtleties of an uncertain philosophy. Its activity now depended exclusively upon the study of the ancients—by no means, however, upon that study in which an attempt was made to master the intellectual spirit of ancient medicine, but which consisted in a slavish adherence to the letter. Every decision of the ancients, without any regard to nature, was made a dogma, and he was the best physician who was most familiar with these dogmas, who understood best how to interpret them most keenly. Mankind had entirely lost the conception that the ancients had attained worth and importance only in that they measured things by the standard of unbiased experience, and tested their conclusions according to the phenomena of nature as described from accurate observation of the sick. It is quite obvious that superstition met with a well-prepared soil in a system of medicine that was overburdened with dogmas and degraded into utter subserviency to a vainglorious philosophy. The natural result was that the medical art of a period of the middle ages, steeped in scholasticism, was nothing but a chaos of the most despicable superstition and folly. The most shocking result of these conditions was the belief in witches, and, with this, medical superstition entered upon a new stage. Whereas until then it had possessed a restricted, mere local vitality, and entailed danger only upon those who, from thoughtlessness, lent a willing ear to it, now it degenerated into a mental epidemic which threatened equally all classes of the people. The unspeakable misery which this variety of medical superstition has brought to the Western world is well known, so that we may refrain from entering into details, referring our readers to the excellent work of Hansen on this subject.