On the strength of assumptions such as these, that "medieval belief in miracles of healing must have checked medical science," and that therefore it did actually prevent the development of scientific medicine, statements are made with regard to the history of {200} medicine that are utterly at variance with the plain facts of history. Once more, as in the case of the supposed failure of surgery to develop during the Middle Ages, it is a deduction that has been made from certain supposed principles, and not an induction from the actual facts as we know them. Such historians would be the first to emphasize the narrowness of the schoolmen for their supposed dependence on deduction, but what they have to say on medical history is entirely deductive, and unfortunately from premises that will not stand in the presence of the story of the wonderful rise and development of medical science and medical education, mainly under the patronage of ecclesiastics, in the Middle Ages. The argument may be stated formally with perfect fairness as follows: When men believe in miracles they cannot build up scientific medicine and surgery; but men believed in miracles in the Middle Ages, therefore they did not build up scientific medicine and surgery. When stated thus baldly in formal scholastic form, the argument loses most of the glamor that has been thrown around it. This is one of the advantages of the old scholastic method--it strips argument to its naked significance. Logic asserts herself and rhetoric loses its force. With regard to the major premise that when men believe in miracles they will not successfully pursue investigations in the medical science, there are two answers. One of these concerns the actual attitude of mind towards scientific medicine of men who believe in miracles, for we have such men still with us, and have always had them all during the past seven centuries. The other portion of the answer concerns what men who were distinguished scientific investigators thought of {201} miracles, and how much they accomplished for the medical sciences while all the time maintaining their belief in the possibility of miraculous intervention for the cure of disease.