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 CHAPTER XX

HOSPITALS AND MONASTERIES IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Long before the Christian era it was the practice among the Greeks to make suitable provision for those who, by reason of poverty or illness, were unable to provide for their own wants or to secure the services of a physician. Their slaves, for example, were sent, when overtaken with illness, or when they had become too feeble to work, to what was termed Xenodochia—institutions where they received kindly care and such medical treatment as was necessary. (Mommsen.) In strong contrast with this humane practice stands the action of those wealthy Roman property owners who, adopting the course recommended by Cato, the famous censor (96-46 B. C.), "sold their slaves when they became old and feeble or ill, as they would old iron, or oxen that can no longer be utilized for work." This cruel practice not only continued throughout a period of nearly three centuries, but apparently became more and more common, for we are told that the Emperor Claudius (268-270 A. D.) was obliged, in order to mitigate the evil, to issue a decree that, when a slave was driven out of the house by his owner, he should be declared free.

Hospitals and Other Kindred Institutions.—Toward the end of the fourth century of the present era the first hospital was established in Rome by the widow Fabiola, a member of the distinguished Fabian family, and her example induced other wealthy Roman ladies to found similar institutions. But already several years before this time the influence of Christianity had made itself felt so strongly in the eastern branch of the Roman Empire that