Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/109

93 The Dark Period in Nursing 93 that only the wives of "freemen" should hold the position of Sister. The under nurses were of in- ferior status. Among the ancient hospitals thus laicized were St. Peter and St. Leonard, at York (founded 936 A.D.), St. Bartholomew's for Lepers in Rochester (1078), St. John Baptist, near Canterbury (1070), St. Giles-in-the-Fields (iioi), St. Bartholomew's, founded by the monk Rahere (i 123), and St. Kath- arine's ( 1 148), The three last named are in London. For a couple of hundred years after the Re- formation, the deterioration in hospital nursing brought about by the changes described continued to spread not only in Eng- Nursing of ttlG SIX* land but on the continent also. The teenthto older system was passing away and the eighteenth centuries new had not yet unfolded. The politi- cal conditions of that period seemed to induce a general apathy and indifference to suffering. The new hospitals erected under city management were mostly cheerless and dreary places, airless and in- sanitary, very different from the spacious, clois- tered, and beautiful buildings of the Saracens and the mediaeval monasteries that had been built in wide country regions, with gardens, and fountains flowing through their courtyards. The medical profession shared in the dulness of (