inistering to the poor
and the infirm. They live according to the rule of St. Augustine,
without property and in community and under obedience to one above
them; and having assumed the regular habit, they promise to God
perpetual continence. The men and women, with all reverence and
chastity, eat and sleep apart. The canonical hours, as far as
hospitality and the care of the poor of Christ allow, by day and
night they attend. In houses where there is a large congregation of
brethren and sisters, they congregate frequently in chapter for the
correction of faults and other causes. Readings from Holy Scriptures
are frequently made during meals, and silence is maintained during
meals in the refectory and other fixed places and at certain times.
.... Their chaplains, ministering in spiritual matters with all
humility and devotion to the infirm, instruct the ignorant in the
word of divine preaching, console the faint-hearted and weak, and
exhort them to patience and to correspond to the action of grace.
They celebrate divine office in the common chapel assiduously by day
and night, so that the sick can hear from their beds. Confession and
extreme unction and the other sacraments they administer diligently
and solicitously to the sick, and to the dead they give due burial.
These ministers of Christ, sober and sparing to themselves and {266}
very strict and severe to their bodies, overflowing with charity to
the poor and infirm and ministering with tender heart to their
necessities according to their powers, are all the more lowly in the
House of God as they were of high rank in the world. They bear for
Christ's sake such unclean and almost intolerable things, that I do
not think any other can be compared to this martyrdom, holy and
precious in the sight of God."

It might perhaps be thought that these hospitals of the Middle Ages
would be of very little interest to the modern student of things
social and medical except for the fact, surprising enough in itself at
this time of supposed neglect of social duties, when the paternal
spirit of the municipality is presumed scarcely to have developed as
yet, that such institutions were provided. It would ordinarily be
assumed that they were, in accordance with the lack of knowledge of
the time as regards the influence of light and air on the ailing,
dingy and unventilated, lacking most of the qualities that distinguish
our modern