Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/212

 Such an example of self-sacrifice and humanity—and there must have been very many similar examples—could not possibly have failed to make a profound impression upon the community at large. Daniel Le Clerc says that three physicians suffered martyrdom for their Christian faith during the reigns of the Emperors Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus and Commodus. They were Papila (of Pergamum), Alexander (of Lyons) and Sanctus (a contemporary of Galen), whose death was of a particularly cruel character. Credit should also be given to Christianity, says the same writer, for having established the rule that every community should assume the expense and responsibility of caring for its own poor and sick. This was a step of the greatest importance; and, at a still later period, when Christianity became largely an affair of the state, a complete hospital organization was effected, with the bishop as the chief officer and, under him, deacons and deaconesses. Such well-organized institutions proved to be of the greatest possible benefit to the advance of medical science. They were the worthy successors of those more ancient hospitals, the Aesculapian temples, which were first established by the Greeks in the pre-Hippocratic age, and they have continued in an unbroken chain from the institutions of those primitive times to the thoroughly well-equipped hospitals of the present day.

In 330 A. D. the new capital of the Roman Empire was established in Byzantium, afterward called Constantinople, and Rome, which for hundreds of years had been the metropolis of the world and the source from which a large part of Roman history had emanated, was given a subordinate position. Then followed, in 410 A. D., the conquest of the latter city by the Visigoths, a horde of uneducated Barbarians who had felt the might of Rome in previous years, and who now doubtless took immense satisfaction in humiliating her and in destroying her valuable possessions. There are good reasons for believing that, when the Emperor Constantine established his residence in Byzantium, the leading physicians of Rome followed him; and it is not likely that many of those who,