[Illustration: Fig. 277.--Margaret of York, third wife of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, one of the most charitable princesses of her time, who died at Mechlin in 1503.--She is represented on her knees between the four Doctors of the Church, St. Gregory, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose. In the background is the Church of St. Gudule, at Brussels.--From a Miniature in a “Traité sur la Miséricorde,” translated from Latin into French by Nicholas Finet, Canon of Cambrai and Almoner to Margaret. (Manuscript of the Fifteenth Century, in the Burgundian Library, Brussels.)] The saddening spectacle of human misery excited the sympathy of Jean de Dieu, a Portuguese gentleman, who had successively fought against the French, the Turks, and the Hungarians; after having led a licentious life as a soldier, he devoted himself to healing the wounded and to the care of the sick (1540). The wounds inflicted by fire-arms required much more careful treatment than those caused by steel weapons, for they were followed by suppuration of a contagious character, and other dangerous consequences; they, moreover, entailed terrible operations, which made an increase in the number of surgeons a matter of absolute necessity. Jean de Dieu determined to make good this deficiency, and he was the originator of the corps of hospital attendants and sick-nurses. But the institution which he founded was not properly organized and put in working order until after his death (1550), in the midst of the Italian wars and the great struggles of France and Spain. [Illustration: Fig. 278.--St. Vincent de Paul.--Reduced Fac-simile of a Drawing by Edelmet (Seventeenth Century).]