Hear all, weigh all with caution, I advise.
‘Thou sniveller! is a slave a man?’ she cries.
‘He’s innocent! be’t so; ’tis my command,
My will; let that, sir, for a reason stand.’”
Although there is evidence that hospitals for the reception and treatment of sick and destitute persons were established in India in very early times,[525] and though we know that these were attached to some of the temples of ancient Greece, and the Romans had convalescent institutions for sick slaves and soldiers, it cannot be doubted that we owe to Christianity the hospital as it exists amongst us at the present day.
Christianity taught the world not only that God is the Father of mankind, the pagan world already knew Him as Zeus pater, but that as His children we are the brethren and sisters of each other. The Church in Rome, in the third century, says Eusebius,[526] supported “widows and impotent persons, about a thousand and fifty souls who were all relieved through the grace and goodness of Almighty God.” St. Basil the Great (A.D. 379) founded at Cæsarea a vast hospital, which Nazianzen calls a new city, and was named after him Basiliades. The same author thought “it might deservedly be reckoned among the miracles of the world, so numerous were the poor and sick that came thither, and so admirable was the care and order with which they were served.”[527] In this institution St. Gregory of Nazianzus said, “disease became a school of wisdom, and misery was changed into happiness.”
Chastel relates that (A.D. 375) Edessa possessed a hospital with 300 beds, and there were many similar institutions in the East. St. Jerome says that the widow Fabiola founded the first Christian infirmary in Rome, at the end of the fourth century. St. Paula, a Roman widow, in whose veins ran the blood of the Scipios, the Gracchi, and Paulus Æmilia, and of Agamemnon, was born in 347 A.D., and was one of the many noble Christian women who devoted their wealth and their lives to the poor, the suffering, and the helpless, in the early days of Christianity. She distributed immense alms, and built a hospital on the road to Jerusalem, and also a monastery for St. Jerome and his monks, whom she maintained, besides three monasteries for women;[528] she carried the sick to their beds in her arms, and with her own hands washed their wounds, as St. Jerome tells us. In Italy, Gaul, and Spain, many asylums for sick and poor persons were built and maintained. Nor were their benefits confined to Christians; for Jews, slaves, and freemen were welcomed to these temples of charity. It is impossible in the limits of this work to trace fully the progress of the hospital movement; enough has been said to prove, as Baas, the Agnostic historian of medicine, admits,[529] that “Hospitals proper, in our sense of the term, did not originate till Christian times.”
When the plague raged at Alexandria, Eusebius tells us,[530] “Many of our brethren, by reason of their great love and brotherly charity, sparing not themselves, cleaved one to another, visited the sick without weariness or heed-taking, and attended upon them diligently, cured them in Christ, which cost them their lives, and being full of other men’s maladies, took the infection of their neighbours.” Such was the initial impulse which Christian charity applied to the healing art; trace we now its splendid results in mediæval times.
In the Middle Ages almost all the monasteries and religious houses had a hospital of one kind or another attached to them; they had not only places of entertainment for pilgrims, but institutions for the treatment and care of the sick and poor. This care of the diseased and helpless was not left to the civil administration alone, but formed part of the regular work of the Church of the middle ages, and by ancient regulation this was placed under the control of the Bishops. The Council of Vienne ordained that if the administrators of a hospital, lay or clerical, became relaxed in the exercise of their charge, proceedings should be taken against them by the Bishops, who should reform and restore the hospital of their own authority.
The Council of Trent granted to Bishops the power of visiting the hospitals. This connection between the hospitals and the ecclesiastical power was acknowledged by the Christian sovereigns of Europe from the earliest times. The Emperor Justinian, for example, gave authority over the hospitals to the Bishops; the property of the hospitals was considered as Church property, and thus was protected in troublous times by the sanctity of religion.[531]