entirely cut off. In all the beautiful provision during the Middle
Ages for the alleviation of human suffering, there was for the insane
almost no care. Some monasteries indeed gave them refuge. We hear of a
charitable work done for them at the London Bethlehem Hospital in the
thirteenth century, at Geneva in the fifteenth, at Marseilles in the
sixteenth, by the Black Penitents in the South of France, by certain
Franciscans in Northern France, by the Alexian Brothers on the Rhine,
and by various agencies in other parts of Europe; but, curiously
enough, the only really important effort in the Christian Church {370}
was stimulated by the Mohammedans." This last clause is a slur on
Christianity absolutely without justification. As is true for all
broad generalizations, to ignore thus the work of caring for the
insane and the methods employed in earlier times, amounts to
deplorable injustice to generations whose provision for the sick of
every class was not only much more abundant, but more rational and
complete, than it has been our custom to recognize and acknowledge.
The earliest city hospitals that we know of were due to the fatherly
care and providence of that great Pope, Innocent III., whose
pontificate (1198-1213) has been more misunderstood than perhaps any
corresponding period of time in history. It was Virchow, the great
German pathologist, whose sympathies with the Papacy were very slight,
and whose attitude in the Kulturkampf in Germany showed him to be a
strenuous opponent of the Papal policy, who paid the high tribute to
Pope Innocent III. which we quote in the chapter on the Foundation of
City Hospitals. It was in connection with these hospitals founded by
Pope Innocent III., or the result of the movement initiated by him,
that the insane were cared for at first. This may seem to have been an
undesirable method, but at the present time there is an almost
universal demand on the part of experts in mental diseases for wards
for the mentally diseased in connection with city hospitals, because
admission is thus facilitated, treatment is begun earlier, the patient
is not left in unsuitable conditions so long, friends are readier to
take measures to bring the patient under proper treatment and
surveillance, and, as a consequence, more of the acutely insane have
the course of their disease modified at once, and more cures take
place than would otherwise be possible. Of course, this was {371} not
the idea of the orig