Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/97

81 Democratic and Secular Tendencies 8i The process of bestowing sainthood upon a nurse has taken place lately enough for us to see how it is done. Mme. de Chantal, grandmother of Mme. de Sevigne, was canonized after her death in 164 1. An inquiry then took place to substantiate her good deeds. The old peasants from her estates were called to testify to the incidents of her life, and told in great detail, and with the most naive realism, all the wonderful cures she had brought about by nursing in their cottages, and by taking serious cases into her own home. Poverty, that social disease which testifies to broken or disregarded natural law in the social organism, has always been the prolific The parent of physical disease, as every beginning of visiting nurse knows. From the earliest of poverty times communities had made efforts, usually futile, to meet this problem. The ancient Jews tried to prevent poverty by their system of the redistribution of land. Classic civilizations arrived at a caste of poverty, and beggars had certain definite rights. Monasticism carried on an immense system of relief by almsgiving, yet it did nothing to prevent poverty, and probably did as much to perpetuate it as to relieve it by doles. However, the whole system of land ownership in the Middle Ages fostered poverty, as it also de- 6