By his influence was founded the Royal College of Physicians, once an adjunct to the University and ever since a great and dignified corporation, which has for many generations contributed eminent men to medical science. But Stearne, like Hippocrates, not only practised; he wrote works on life and death; he was a theorist and a philosopher. This man, writing from the highest standpoint of Cambridge and of Dublin in the middle of the seventeenth century, tells us over and over again that the works of Hippocrates are wellnigh infallible, and are the only sure guide to medical science in his day.[37] The causes of this attitude are not far to seek. All mediæval medicine had been ruined by the admission of supernatural influences, special interventions, the action of evil spirits, the conjunction of hostile constellations, and other rubbish at which we now smile, but which men of science then deplored. The first great feature in Hippocrates is the utter ignoring of any such influences as the special causes of disease or cure. He is afraid of no ghost or goblin, he never mentions an incantation. And here is a momentous passage, which probably few of you have ever read, that expresses the mental attitude of his school. He is speaking of a class of patients affected with impotence who are venerated among the Scythians and even worshipped, each man fearing for himself, as he attributes the sickness to a special visitation of his God. “Well now I also think that these diseases are of divine ordinance and so are all the rest, but not one of them more divine or human than the rest, but all are homogeneous, and all from the gods. Yet each of them has its nature, and nothing happens without a natural cause.” He then goes on to explain the disease from the practice of too much riding, and observing that it attacks the rich more usually than the poor, because the latter do not live on horseback, he argues: If this disease were indeed more divine in origin than the rest, it ought not to attack the rich and well bred among the Scythians, but all alike; nay rather the poor in preference, if indeed the gods delight in honour and service from men, and show them favour accordingly. For it is but natural that the rich should offer many sacrifices to the gods as they have both wealth and honour; but the poor less so, either from want of means, or want of good will toward the gods who have not favoured them, so that the poor ought to be specially subject to punishment for their transgressions or mistakes. But as I said before, this disease is heaven-sent like the rest. For everything happens according to nature.