How widespread this sort of thing really was is impossible to say. What is clear is that, running right through the medieval and early modern periods and beyond, there was a well-established stereotype: the sceptical, amoral and self-serving physician, a colleague to the deceitful, amoral and self-serving lawyer and the hypocritical, amoral and self-serving priest. It is already there in Chaucer, whose physician’s studies were ‘but little on the Bible’. A seventeenth-century proverb had it that ‘where there are three physicians, there are two atheists’.[28] Stereotypes of this kind may be unfair or ill-founded, but they take on a life of their own. Sometimes people who grow weary of labouring under hostile assumptions decide they may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
Medics’ supposed atheism was of a specific kind. They were described as ‘naturians’, often ‘mere’ or ‘sole’ naturians. ‘The disease incident to your profession’, one preacher told physicians, is ‘even to be half Atheists, and that by ascribing so much to natural and second causes, and too little to God’. What made it worse was that their patients might be tempted into similar unbelief, placing their hopes for recovery in a doctor’s skill rather than God’s mercy.[29] The more expert the physician, the more likely that his expertise would blind him to the larger truth, and that he would, as the great physician-philosopher Robert Burton warned, ‘attribute all to natural causes’.[30]
In the 1560s, the English physician William Bullein penned a vivid fictional portrait of this kind of unbelief. Antonius, a wealthy merchant, consults Medicus, his physician, frankly admitting that he would spend his entire fortune to save his life, and recalling that in his ‘last great Fever’ he had paid Medicus handsomely. Already we are some way from the Christian ideal, in which the sick submit to God’s will and devote themselves to prayer and charity. But Medicus, knowing on which side his bread is buttered, praises Antonius’ attitude, and supports it by quoting an obscure biblical verse: ‘Honour the Physician, with the honour that is due unto him.’[31] Antonius, amused, points out that Medicus has left out the rest of the verse, which attributes all true healing to God. Lest he seem like a Bible-basher, he hastily adds that he only recognises the verse because he recently chanced to hear it being read when he and his bailiffs were in a church, lying in wait to ambush a pair of bankrupts. Medicus is unabashed at being caught out. ‘I care not, for I meddle with no Scripture matters, but to serve my turn.’ And he points out that, if either of them were to take heed of preachers quoting awkward Bible verses, they could hardly ply their trades as they do. Antonius happily agrees: the Bible is full of ridiculous principles that would bring all normal human society to a standstill, such as ‘the Ten Commandments, etcetera’. If we are really going to be damned for everyday profanity and hating our enemies, ‘then I warrant you, Hell is well furnished’.[32]
So far this is mere impiety, but now matters take a new turn. ‘I think that we two are of one religion,’ Medicus says, conspiratorially. Antonius is nonplussed: ‘I know not mine own religion’, so how can it be the same as someone else’s? Medicus now asks him to check that no one else can overhear them: secrets are about to be spoken. When he is certain that they are alone, he says to Antonius: ‘Hark in your ear sir, I am neither Catholic, Papist, Protestant, nor Anabaptist.’ Antonius asks, ‘What do you honour? The sun, the moon, or the stars?’ None of them, says Medicus. ‘To be plain, I am a Nulla fidian’: a person of no faith. (The newly coined English word atheist was not yet in widespread use.) ‘There are many of our sect’, he adds. And then comes the truly remarkable feature of this exchange. Having heard what ought to be the most shocking religious confession imaginable, Antonius is almost disappointed. He had apparently been hoping for something more novel. ‘Oh. One who says in his heart there is no God. Well, we differ very little in this point.’ He takes his prescription and leaves Medicus to his next patient.[33]
This was satirical fiction, the work of an author who was himself an ardent believer, and ought not to be taken too literally. Still, this much is plain. Physicians were the heirs to medieval Europe’s most robustly secular intellectual tradition. And while they might accept God’s role in human health and sickness, they could do nothing about it and so inevitably tended to ignore it. Whatever their own beliefs, their vocation led them to neglect God, and to do so at a moment when a patient might otherwise be rediscovering the urgency of faith.
So the physician’s consulting room can join the alehouse and gaming table on our list of secularised spaces. Since learned medicine was a tiny world, the preserve of a handful of university-educated doctors and those wealthy enough to be able to afford their services, this is perhaps not very important. Moreover, for all medieval and early modern medicine’s self-importance, it was very often useless and frequently worse, which did not increase its moral authority. Even the staunchest atheist might have been wiser to trust in God’s mercy than to submit to a medieval physician.
Nevertheless, medical secularism could be corrosive, for even in the Middle Ages medicine always held the potential for innovation and scepticism. Patients had an irritating tendency to be more interested in whether a treatment worked than in whether it had good scholarly credentials. When the medical establishment despised experimenters as ‘empirics’ and froze them out of the academy, this merely spurred them on. It is no coincidence that the most notorious Christian dissident of the sixteenth century, Miguel Servetus, who denied the doctrines of the Trinity and of original sin, was also a physician who pioneered theories of the circulation of blood. In the following century, Sir Thomas Browne peered over the edge of unbelief with a coolly critical eye, and used his professional skills to ask searching questions of his religion. The method for determining virginity provided in the book of Deuteronomy, ‘I find … is very fallible’. He suggested that the supposed miracle by which Moses defended the Israelites from snakebite was ‘but an Egyptian trick’; that the fire Elijah had called down from Heaven could be explained chemically; that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was due to ‘Asphaltic and Bituminous’ materials in the water rather than to the people’s sin. This kind of thinking was by no means a slippery slope to atheism – Browne’s case proves that, as we will see – but nor was it a path to simple faith.[34]
In the late 1650s, a Parisian priest named Paul Beurrier visited an aged physician in his parish, whose name he gave only as Basin. This man had travelled widely in Europe, in Turkey and in the East Indies, and had studied with Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Indian Brahmins. In the end, he concluded that ‘all religions were only dreams, and political institutions used by rulers to use the deception of religion and the fear of Divinity to procure their subjects’ submission’. He returned to Paris, ‘determined to live and to die in philosophy’. Beurrier, the kind of priest who enjoys a challenge, visited Basin several times, and Basin eventually laid out for him what he called ‘my philosopher’s religion’. He accepted the existence of a distant, impersonal God who ‘did not involve himself in our affairs, as being beneath him’, but he insisted: ‘First, that the Christian religion is the greatest of all fables; second, that the Bible is the oldest of all fictions; third, that the greatest of all deceivers and impostors is Jesus Christ.’
Basin’s