hundred years later the
hospital was taken in hand by Edward IV. and provided with an
establishment of Master, eight brethren, priests, and four sisters, who
served the sick. They were all subject to the Rule of St. Austin. After
the death of Whittington, the hospital buildings were repaired by his
bequests. On the dissolution of the religious houses, the Priory and
Hospital of Bartholomew fell with the rest, but five years later the
hospital was refounded and endowed by the King and the City.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE HALL AT PENSHURST, KENT.

(_Showing the screen with minstrels' gallery over it, and the brazier
for fire in the middle; built about 1340._)]

If you visit a hospital and are taken into a ward, you see a row of
clean white beds arranged in orderly position on either side of the long
room: the temperature is regulated: the ventilation is perfect: there
are means by which the patient can be examined in private: the diseases
are apportioned to separate wards: every thing is managed with the
greatest cleanliness and order: if an operation is performed the patient
is kept under chloroform and feels nothing. The physicians are men of
the highest scientific reputation: the nurses are trained assistants:
the food is the best that can be procured. The poorest man brought to
the hospital is treated with the same care, the same science, the same
luxuries as the richest.

Look, however, at the hospital as founded by Rahere.

There is a great hall with a chapel at one end: at which mass is daily
sung. The room is narrow and lofty, lit by Norman windows, two or three
on a side: there is a lanthorn in the roof: under the lanthorn a fire is
burning every day, the smoke rising to the roof: the hall is dark and
ill ventilated, the air foul and heavy with the breath of sixty or
seventy sick men lying in beds arranged in rows along the wall. There
are not separate beds for each patient, but as the sick are brought in
they are laid together side by side, in the same bed, whatever the
disease, so that he who suffers from fever is placed beside another who
suffers from palsy. There are four in a bed, and in times of pressure
even more. Sometimes one arrives who develops the plague, when the
whole of the patients in the hospital catch the infection and all die
together. The surgeons are especially skilled in the dressing of wounds
received in battle or in fray: the sisters can tie up a broken limb and
stop a bleeding w