"When you hear of the luxuries of the Ancients, you must remember that they were not like our luxuries, they were rather indulgence in pieces of extravagant folly than what we to-day call luxury—which, perhaps, you would rather call comfort; well, I accept the word, and say that a Greek or a Roman of the luxurious time would stare astonished could he be brought back again and shown the comforts of a well-to-do middle-class house.
"But some, I know, think that the attainment of these very comforts is what makes the difference between civilization and uncivilization—that they are the essence of civilization. Is it so indeed? Farewell my hope then! I had thought that civilization meant the attainment of peace and order and freedom, of good-will between man and man, of the love of truth and the hatred of injustice, and by consequence the attainment of the good life which these things breed, a life free from craven fear, but full of incident; that was what I thought it meant, not more stuffed chairs and more cushions, and more carpets and gas, and more dainty meat and drink—and therewithal more and sharper differences between class and class.
"If that be what it is, I for my part wish I were well out of it and living in a tent in the Persian desert, or a turf hut on the Iceland hillside. But, however it be, and I think my view is the true view, I tell you that art abhors that side of civilization; she cannot breath in the houses that lie under its stuffy slavery.
"Believe me, if we want art to begin at home, as it must, we must clear our houses of troublesome superfluities that are forever in our way, conventional comforts that are no real comforts, and do but make work for servants and doctors. If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.'"
COMFORT AND HEALTH.
A comment on William Morris's significant paragraphs may be summed up in some reflections on the scornful expression of a friend who asked, how is it possible to talk of happiness at a time when there were no glass in windows and no heating apparatus except the open fireplace in the great hall of the larger houses, or in the kitchen of the dwelling houses. To this there is the ready answer that, in the modern time, we have gone so far to the opposite extreme as to work serious harm to health. When a city dweller develops tuberculosis, his physician now sends him out to the mountains, asks him to sleep with his window wide open, and requires him to spend just as much of his time as possible in the open air, even with the temperature below zero. In our hospitals, the fad for making patients comfortable by artificial heat is passing, and that of stimulating them by cold, fresh air is gaining ground. We know that, for all the fevers and all the respiratory [{477}] diseases this brings about a notable reduction in the mortality. Surely, what is good for the ailing must be even better to keep them well from disease. Many a physician now arranges to sleep out of doors all winter. Certainly all the respiratory diseases are rendered much more fatal and modern liability to them greatly increased by our shut-up houses. The medieval people were less comfortable, from a sensual standpoint, but the healthy glow and reaction after cold probably made them enjoy life better than we do in our steam-heated houses. They secured bodily warmth by an active circulation of their blood. We secure it by the circulation of hot water or steam in our houses. Ours may be the better way, but the question is not yet absolutely decided. A physician friend points to the great reduction in the death-rate in modern times, and insists that this, of course, means definite progress. Even this is not quite so sure as is often thought. We are saving a great many lives that heretofore, in the course of nature, under conditions requiring a more vigorous life, passed out of existence early. It is doubtful, however, whether this is an advantage for the race, since our insane asylums, our hospitals for incurables and our homes of various kinds now have inmates in much greater proportion to the population than ever before in history. These are mainly individuals of lower resistive vitality, who would have been allowed to get out of existence early, save themselves and their friends from useless suffering, and whose presence in life does not add greatly if at all to the possibilities of human accomplishment. Our reduced death-rate is, because of comfort seeking, more than counterbalanced by a reduced birth-rate, so that no advantage is reaped for the race in the end. These reflections, of course, are only meant to suggest how important it is to view such questions from all sides before being sure that they represent definite progress for humanity. Progress is much more elusive than is ordinarily thought, and is never the simple, unmistakable movement of advance it is often thought.
HYGIENE.
The objection that medical friends have had to the claims of The Thirteenth as the Greatest of Centuries is that it failed to pay any attention to hygiene. Here, once more, we have a presumption that is not founded on real knowledge of the time. It is rather easy to show that these generations were anticipating many of our solutions of hygienic problems quite as well as our solutions of other social and intellectual difficulties. In the sketch of Pope John XXI., the physician who became Pope during the second half of the Thirteenth Century, which was published in Ophthalmology, a quarterly review of eye diseases (Jan., 1909), because Pope John wrote a little book on this subject which has many valuable anticipations of modern knowledge, I called attention to the fact that, while a physician and professor of [{478}] medicine at the medical school of the University of Sienna, this Pope, then known as Peter of Spain, had made some contributions to sanitary science. Later he was appointed Archiater, that is, Physician in charge of the City of Rome. As pointed out in the sketch of him as enlarged for the volume containing a second series of Catholic Churchmen in Science (The Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909), he seems to have been particularly interested in popular health, for we have a little book, Thesaurus Pauperum—The Treasure of the Poor—which contains many directions for the maintenance of health and the treatment of disease by those who are too poor to secure physicians' advice. The fact that the head of the Bureau of Health in Rome should have been made Pope in the Thirteenth Century, itself speaks volumes for the awakening of the educated classes at least to the value of hygiene and sanitation.
Their attention to hygiene can be best shown by a consideration of the hospitals. Ordinarily it is assumed that the hospitals provided a roof for the sick and the injured, but scarcely more. Most physicians will probably be quite sure that they were rather hot-beds of disease than real blessings to the ailing. That is not what we find when we study them carefully. These generations gave us a precious lesson by eradicating leprosy, which was quite as general as tuberculosis is now, and they made special hospitals for erysipelas, which materially lessened the diffusion of that disease. In rewriting the chapter on The Foundation of City Hospitals for my book, The Popes and Science (Fordham University Press, N. Y., 1908), I incorporated into it a description of the hospital erected at Tanierre, in France, in 1293, by Marguerite of Bourgogne, the sister of St. Louis. Of this hospital Mr. Arthur Dillon, from the standpoint of the modern architect, says:
"It was an admirable hospital in every way, and it is doubtful if we to-day surpass it. It was isolated, the ward was separated from the other buildings; it had the advantage we often lose, of being but one story high, and more space was given to each patient than we now afford.
"The ventilation by the great windows and ventilators in the ceiling was excellent; it was cheerfully lighted, and the arrangement of the gallery shielded the patients from dazzling light and from draughts from the windows, and afforded an easy means of supervision, while the division by the roofless, low partitions isolated the sick and obviated the depression that comes from the sight of others in pain.
"It was, moreover, in great contrast to the cheerless white wards of to-day. The vaulted ceiling was very beautiful; the woodwork was richly carved, and the great windows over the altars were filled with colored glass. Altogether, it was one of the best examples of the best period of Gothic architecture."
In their individual Hygiene there was, of course, much to be desired among the people of the Thirteenth Century, and it has been declared that the history of Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century might, from the hygienic standpoint, he summed up as a thousand years without a bath. The more we know about this period, however, the less of [{479}] point do we find in the epigram. Mr. Cram, in the Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain (Pott & Co., N. Y., 1907), has described wonderful arrangements within the monasteries (!) for the conduction of water from long distances for all toilet purposes. There was much more attention to sanitary details than we have been prone to think. Mr. Cram, in describing what was by no means one of the greatest of the English abbeys of the Thirteenth Century, says:
"Here at Beaulieu the water was brought by an underground conduit from an unfailing spring a mile away, and this served for drinking, washing and bathing, the supply of the fish ponds, and for a constant flushing of the elaborate system of drainage. In sanitary matters, the monks were as far in advance of the rest of society as they were in learning and agriculture."