Page:The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800.djvu/270

 necessity of undertaking immediately work of an exhausting character.

Monasteries in Their Relation to Medicine.—While at first these institutions were designed chiefly as places of refuge from the turmoil of the world and from the violence of frequent warfare, it became evident in the course of time that the evils incident to such a secluded and self-centered life hindered rather than promoted the development of those particular virtues which Jesus Christ urged his followers to cultivate. This experience led to the adoption of a different kind of cloister life; and so it came about, as stated by Neuburger, that in 529 A. D. Benedictus of Nursia founded, at an isolated spot high up on the slope of Monte Cassino, in Campania, Italy, the now famous parent monastery of the Benedictine Order. According to the original regulations of this order, the monks were obliged to perform every day a certain amount of manual labor as well as devotional exercises. Nine years later Cassiodorus, who had for a long period been a sort of Secretary of State under Theodoric the Great and his successors, became a monk, and, from that time to the day of his death, "devoted all his energies to the service of God and the advancement of science." He secured a house not far from the Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino, gathered together there a considerable library, and made it a rule of the place that the copying of original codices (the majority of them theological) constituted the most useful and honorable form of manual labor. A few years later, this smaller establishment was made a part of the monastery at Monte Cassino, and the rule just mentioned was thereafter adopted by the enlarged institution. But the care of the sick, the feeble, and children was the particular work which Benedictus, the founder of this institution, had most at heart. Cassiodorus went even farther and urged upon the brethren the desirability of studying the healing art and of utilizing, for this purpose, the works of ancient medical authors.

Learn all you can, he said, about the characteristics of different plants and about the methods of preparing medicinal mixtures,