The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
History
The growth of medicine from the earliest times to about 1800
Buck, Albert H. (Albert Henry)
Medicine -- History
the value of which was sufficient to pay the entire expense of erecting
the hospital. Upon the completion of the building and the equipment
of its spacious wards in the most perfect manner possible, the Sultan
expressed himself in the following terms:--
I have founded this institution for people of my own class
and for those who occupy an humbler station in life--for the
king and for the servant, for the common soldier and for the
Emir, for the rich man and for the poor, for the freeman and
for the slave, for men and also for women. I have made ample
provision for all the remedial agents that may be required, for
physicians, and for everything else that may prove useful in any
form of illness....
One of the characteristic features in the management of this hospital,
says Le Clerc, was the custom of giving to each of the poorer inmates,
when he left the institution, five pieces of gold, in order that he
might be spared the 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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