Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/106

90 hundred years of resistance for women to overcome this decree, which worked great hardship on those who felt capable of active, useful careers, yet who desired to remain faithful to the church. The nursing Sisters of France, however, made little or no resistance, and their professional standards retrograded in consequence. From the standpoint of the prosperity of the monastic system itself the growing dogmatism of the clergy was most mistaken, for, ever since the thirteenth century, the gradual trend of things generally had been away from monasticism. With the progress of commerce and trade, the growth of the middle class and the extension of knowledge, monasticism no longer made the same appeal as at an earlier time, nor offered the sole opportunity to the best and finest characters, and, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, efforts vainly made to reform faults of apathy and laxity show us that nursing shared in a general lowering of grade.

And yet the abrupt change brought about by the sudden closing of monasteries during the Reformation shut many hospitals to the sick poor and threw nursing for a time into a state of utter disorganization, for public authorities were by no means ready to take over such work, nor was mediæval Protestantism more liberal in its attitude