The hospitals of the Middle Ages are particularly interesting, because they represent a solution of the social problems other than merely the relief of pain and suffering, or the care of the needy who have none to care for them. They represent a ready, constantly near opportunity for the better-to-do classes to exercise charity toward those who needed it most. The hospitals were always in the busiest portions of the towns, and were often visited by the citizens, both men and women. Dr. John S. Billings, in his description of "The Johns Hopkins Hospital" (Baltimore, 1890), touched upon this spirit of the hospital movement of the Middle Ages in a very appropriate way when he said: "When the medieval priest established in each great city of France a Hotel Dieu, a place for God's hospitality, it was in the interest of charity as he understood it, including both the helping of the sick poor, and the affording of those who were neither sick nor poor an opportunity and a stimulus to help their fellow-men; and doubtless the cause of humanity and religion was advanced more by the effect on the givers than on the receivers." A rather significant historical detail with regard to medieval hospitals is the foundation of a special order to take care of the hospitals in which St. Anthony's Fire, or what we know as erysipelas, was treated. Apparently this indicated the recognition of the contagiousness of this disease by the medieval people. Pope Honorius III. approved the foundation of an order of nurses particularly devoted to the care of patients suffering from this affection. Other religious congregations for the same works seem to have been established. We did not recognize the contagiousness of the disease until the last generation. Undoubtedly these special foundations made it possible to control many of the epidemics of erysipelas that used to make surgical care in our hospitals in the modern time such a difficult matter. Even as late as our Civil War here in America, erysipelas was the special dread of the hospital surgeon. Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out that erysipelas might readily be carried to the parturient woman with the production of child-bed fever. It is interesting to realize, then, the attempt of the medieval period to segregate the disease. [Illustration: THE HARBLEDOWN HOSPITAL, NEAR CANTERBURY _From "Medieval Hospitals," by Miss R. M. Clay_ "On the outskirts of a town, seven hundred years ago, the eye of the traveller would have been caught by a well-known landmark--a group of cottages, with an adjoining chapel, clustering round a green enclosure. At a glance he would recognize it as the lazar-house, and would prepare to throw an alms to the crippled and disfigured representative of the community."]