Official recommendations to hold medicine in respect “on account of its necessity” came from the pulpit. Priests and doctors gave each other mutual support and divided the empire between them.[51] Scholars unearthed the old story of a medical student who bore himself like an angel while attending an Aspasia. But in spite of these little testimonials, ill-natured folk like Ronsard, Brantôme and others continued with more or less virtuous indignation to make doctors their butt. Dolce[52] amuses himself by relating the misadventure of a young husband, who, having confided to his physician his intense longing to become a father, was ere long lodging with the courts a complaint that he had too speedily obtained his wish. The public was always ready to laugh at stories of this kind. Medical science was often considered as an instrument of corruption. Champier, who practised at Lyons, in good set terms accuses his fellow-physicians of becoming veritable agents of demoralisation, and of perverting their patients’ moral sense. So far as medicine was concerned, women showed a becoming modesty in their ambition. Many medical women were women of the old school, who acknowledged the superiority of men. They confined themselves to a well-defined field of study. As soon as she marries, a woman will join battle with sickness; by and by she will have children to take care of, then it will be her duty to preserve her beauty and charms. Here is a medical field well marked out for her. On other points she remains subordinate to men, leaving to them in particular all lofty speculations. An eminent, if not the foremost place in the medicine of the schools was then held by astrology, to which the physicians, wise in their generation, owed a great part of their prestige.[53] Assuredly it was not hard to believe, with Plato and the Christian church, that the universe does not end with man, and that above us there is a hierarchy of supernatural beings, imperceptible to our senses, on whom we depend, and whose wings sometimes seem to brush us as they pass: those beings whom Ronsard has invoked, in verses of so much beauty, as witnesses of his love: Ailés démons, qui tenez de la terre Et du haut ciel justement le milieu, Postes divins, divins postes de Dieu.[54] Many physicians held that the noblest part of their art consisted in penetrating if possible the mystery of the influence of these supernatural forces. Further, how could they but discover, even in the natural order of material things, a universal harmony, intimate relations between the health of women and the ocean tides and the revolutions of the heavens, a thousand bonds— D’innombrables liens, frêles et douloureux, Qui vont dans l’univers entier de l’âme aux choses.[55]