There seems, however, to have been not nearly so much freedom or so much encouragement for women in medicine in France as in Italy. Indeed, in the whole matter of education for women, medieval France has but little to record compared to Italy's significant chapter in the history of feminine education. One reason for this was doubtless the Hélöise-Abélard incident early in the history of the University of Paris. This seems to have discouraged efforts in the direction of the securing of the higher education for women in most of the Western Universities. Oxford was a daughter university of Paris, and Cambridge of Oxford, and they and all the other universities of the West were more deeply influenced in their customs and organization by Paris than by Italy, and as a consequence we hear little of feminine education in the West generally. One result of this has been the existence of a feeling that, since women had very few opportunities for the higher education in Western Europe, they must have had them nowhere else. This presumption forms the basis of not a little misunderstanding of the Middle Ages in our time. It often takes but a little incident to set the current of history in a very different direction from that in which it might have gone, and this seems to have been the case as regards the higher education for women in France and Spain and England. CHAPTER X MEDIEVAL HOSPITALS Our recent experience makes it easy to understand that such magnificent advance in surgery as has been described in the preceding chapters would have been quite impossible unless there were excellent hospitals in the medieval period. Good surgery demands good hospitals, and indeed inevitably creates them. Whenever hospitals are in a state of neglect, surgery is hopeless. We have, however, abundant evidence of the existence of fine hospitals in the Middle Ages, quite apart from this assumption of them, because of the surprising surgery of the period. Historical traditions from the earlier as well as the later medieval times demonstrate a magnificent development of hospital organization. While there had been military hospitals and a few civic institutions for the care of citizens in Roman times, and some hospital traditions in the East and in connection with the temples in Egypt, hospital organization as we know it is Christian in origin; and particularly the erection of institutions for the care of the ailing poor came to be looked upon very early as a special duty of Christians. Even the Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, declared that the old Olympian religion would inevitably lose its hold on the people, unless somehow it could show such care for others in need as the Christians exhibited wherever they obtained a foothold. It was not, however, until nearly the beginning of the Middle Ages that the Christians were in sufficient numbers in the cities, and were free enough from interference by government, to take up seriously the problem of