If you visit a hospital and are taken into a ward, you see a row of clean white beds arranged in orderly position on either side of the long room: the temperature is regulated: the ventilation is perfect: there are means by which the patient can be examined in private: the diseases are apportioned to separate wards: every thing is managed with the greatest cleanliness and order: if an operation is performed the patient is kept under chloroform and feels nothing. The physicians are men of the highest scientific reputation: the nurses are trained assistants: the food is the best that can be procured. The poorest man brought to the hospital is treated with the same care, the same science, the same luxuries as the richest. Look, however, at the hospital as founded by Rahere. There is a great hall with a chapel at one end: at which mass is daily sung. The room is narrow and lofty, lit by Norman windows, two or three on a side: there is a lanthorn in the roof: under the lanthorn a fire is burning every day, the smoke rising to the roof: the hall is dark and ill ventilated, the air foul and heavy with the breath of sixty or seventy sick men lying in beds arranged in rows along the wall. There are not separate beds for each patient, but as the sick are brought in they are laid together side by side, in the same bed, whatever the disease, so that he who suffers from fever is placed beside another who suffers from palsy. There are four in a bed, and in times of pressure even more. Sometimes one arrives who develops the plague, when the whole of the patients in the hospital catch the infection and all die together. The surgeons are especially skilled in the dressing of wounds received in battle or in fray: the sisters can tie up a broken limb and stop a bleeding wound. The brethren go about the beds administering the last offices of the Church to the dying. The food is scanty: the appliances are rude: there is small hope of recovery: yet to die in hospital tended and consoled instead of in the hut where life has been passed is something for which to be grateful. [Illustration: THE UPPER CHAMBER OR SOLAR AT SUTTON COURTENAY MANOR-HOUSE. (_Date, about 1350._)]