rinted books, so
many of them monuments of learning and masterpieces of editorial work
with regard to medieval masters of medicine, were lying in libraries
waiting to be unearthed and restudied during the nineteenth century.
German and French scholars, especially during the last generation, have
recovered the knowledge of this thousand years of human activity, and we
know now and can sympathetically study how the men of these times faced
their problems, which were very much those of our own time, in almost
precisely the same spirit as we do ours at the present time, and that
their solutions of them are always interesting, often thorough and
practical, and more frequently than we would like to think possible,
resemble our own in many ways. For the possibility of this we are
largely indebted originally to the scholars of the Renaissance. Without
their work that of our investigators would have been quite unavailing.
It is to be hoped, however, that our recovery of this period will not be
followed by any further eclipse, though that seems to be almost the rule
of human history, but that we shall continue to broaden our sympathetic
knowledge of this wonderful medieval period, the study of which has had
so many surprises in store for us.

II

GREAT PHYSICIANS IN EARLY CHRISTIAN TIMES

What we know of the life of the Founder of Christianity and how much He
did for the ailing poor would make us expect that the religion that He
established would foster the care and the cure of suffering humanity. As
we have outlined in the Introduction, the first of the works of
Christian service that was organized was the care of the sick. At first
a portion of the bishop's house was given over to the shelter of the
ailing, and a special order of assistants to the clergy, the
deaconesses, took care of them. As Christians became more numerous,
special hospitals were founded, and these became public institutions
just as soon as freedom from persecution allowed the Christians the
liberty to give overt expression to their feelings for the poor. While
hospitals of limited capacity for such special purposes as the
sheltering of slaves or of soldiers and health establishments of various
kinds for the wealthy had been erected before Christianity, this was the
first time that anyone who was ill, no matter what the state of his
pecuniary resources, could be sure to find shelter and care. The
expression of the Emperor Julian the Apostate, that