acquired medical knowledge of a high order. The Jewish writer Margoliouth dwells on this fact with some complacency, and goes on to contrast the scientific methods of the Hebrew doctors with the quackeries of the monks:
In spite of the reports circulated by the monks, that the Jews were sorcerers (in consequence of their superior medical skill), Christian patients would frequent the houses of the Jewish physicians in preference to the monasteries, where cures were pretended to have been effected by some extraordinary relics, such as the nails of St. Augustine, the extremity of St. Peter's second toe, ... etc. It need hardly be added that the cures effected by the Jewish physicians were more numerous than those by the monkish impostors.<sup></sup>
Yet in reality the grotesque remedies which Margoliouth attributes to Christian superstition appear to have been partly derived from Jewish sources. The author of a further article on Magic in Hastings' Encyclopædia goes on to say that the magical formulæ handed down in Latin in ancient medical writings and used by the monks were mainly of Eastern origin, derived from Babylonish, Egyptian, and Jewish magic. The monks therefore "played merely an intermediate rôle." Indeed, if we turn to the Talmud we shall find cures recommended no less absurd than those which Margoliouth