Page:A History of the Knights of Malta, or the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.djvu/573

Rh been esteemed a sanctuary within which fugitives from justice might escape the fangs of the law. The exceptions to this right of sanctuary became, however, by successive decrees, so numerous that it is difficult to conceive what crimes remained for which it continued to afford shelter. The exceptions were these:—“No assassins shall find protection there, nor those who pillage and ravage the country by night, nor incendiaries, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor conspirators, nor those who have been found guilty of having caused the death of any one, either by secret treachery, or in cold blood, or by poison, or by treason. No servant of any of the brethren shall find sanctuary there, nor those who have offered any violence either to them or to our judges or other ministers of justice, nor debtors, nor such malicious persons as may have committed crimes within the infirmary under an idea that it was a sanctuary; nor, lastly, lawyers or witnesses convicted of perjury, nor murderers who infest the roads to rob and kill the passers by.”

It has already been pointed out how objectionable the site of the Hospital was from a sanitary point of view. The internal arrangements evidently were also not all that could be desired. Howard, the philanthropist, in his “Lazarettos in Europe in 1789,” thus speaks of it: “The pavement is of neat marble or stone squares. The ceiling is lofty, but being wood, now turned black, the windows being small, and the walls hung round with dusty pictures, this noble hail makes but a gloomy appearance. All the patients lie single. One ward is for patients dangerously sick or dying, another for patients of the middle rank of life, and the third for the lower and poorer sort of patients. In this last ward (which is the largest) there were four rows of beds, in the others only two. They were all so dirty and offensive as to create the necessity of perfuming them, and yet I observed that the physician, in going his rounds, was obliged to keep his handkerchief to his face. The use of perfume I always reckon a proof of inattention to cleanliness and airiness; and this inattention struck me forcibly on opening some of the private closets with which this hail is very properly furnished. The patients are twice a day, at eight and four, served with provisions, one of the knights and the under-physician constantly attending in the two halls and seeing the distribution. From