redit as another sanitary
benefit conferred on his generation.

Many orders for the care of special needs of humanity were established
during the thirteenth century. It is from this period that most of the
religious habits worn by women originate. They used to be considered
rather cumbersome for such a serious work as the nursing and care of
the sick, but in recent years quite a different view has been taken.
The covering of the head, for instance, and the shearing of the hair
must have been of distinct value in preventing the communication of
contagious diseases. There has been a curious assimilation in the last
few years of the dress required to be worn by nurses in operating
rooms to that worn by most of the religious communities. The head must
be completely covered and the garments worn are of material that can
be washed. {279} It will be recalled that the head-dress of religious
being, as a rule, of white, on which the slightest speck shows, must
be renewed frequently, and therefore must be kept in a condition of
what is practically surgical cleanliness. While this was not at all
the intention of those who adopted the particular style of head-dress
worn by religious, yet their choice has proved, in what may well be
considered a Providential way, an excellent protective for the
patients on whom they waited, against certain dangers that would
inevitably have been present, if their dress had been the ordinary one
of the women of their class, during these many centuries of hospital
nursing by religious women.

In a word, then, all the features which characterize our modern
hospitals, found a place in the old-time institutions for the care of
the ailing, which we owe to the initiative of the Church and religious
orders, and above all, the Popes. While we are accustomed to hear
these old-time institutions spoken of slightingly, that is because our
knowledge of them was not as detailed as it should be, until the
recent interest in things medieval revealed many details previously
misunderstood. The hospitals of the thirteenth, fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries were much better than those of subsequent
centuries down practically to our own time. The reason for this
decadence is rather complex, but it evidently occurred in spite of the
Church and the Popes. Much of it was due to the fact that,
particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the political
governments interfered in the work of charity and hospital