public hospital organization. The rapidity of the development, once external obstacles were removed, shows clearly how close to the heart of Christianity was the subject of care for the ailing poor. St. Basil's magnificent foundation at Cæsarea in Cappadocia, called the _Basilias_, which took on the dimensions of a city (termed Newtown) with regular streets, buildings for different classes of patients, dwellings for physicians and nurses and for the convalescent, and apparently even workshops and industrial schools for the care and instruction of foundlings and of children that had been under the care of the monastery, as well as for what we would now call reconstruction work, shows how far hospital organization, even in the latter part of the fourth century, had developed. About the year 400 Fabiola at Rome, according to St. Jerome, "established a Nosocomium to gather in the sick from the streets, and to nurse the wretched sufferers wasted from poverty and disease." A little later Pammachius, a Roman Senator, founded a Xenodochium for the care of strangers which St. Jerome praises in one of his letters. At the end of the fifth century Pope Symmachus built hospitals in connection with the three most important churches of Rome, St. Peter's, St. Paul's, and St. Lawrence's. During the Pontificate of Vigilius, Belisarius founded a Xenodochium in the _Via Lata_ at Rome, shortly after the middle of the sixth century. Christian hospitals were early established in the cities of France; and not long after the conversion of England, in that country. In connection with these hospitals, it is rather easy to understand the fine development of surgery by early Christian physicians which we have traced. The later medieval period of hospital building, however, is of particular interest in the history of medicine, because we have such details of it as show its excellent adaptation to medical and surgical needs. According to Virchow, in his article on the History of German Hospitals, which is to be found in the second volume of his collected "Essays on Public Medicine and the History of Epidemics,"[14] the story of the foundation of these hospitals of the Middle Ages, even those of Germany, centres around the name of one man, Pope Innocent III. Virchow was not at all a papistically inclined writer, so that his tribute to the great Pope who solved so finely the medico-social problems of his time undoubtedly represents a merited recognition of a great social development in history.