Chastel relates that (A.D. 375) Edessa possessed a hospital with 300 beds, and there were many similar institutions in the East. St. Jerome says that the widow Fabiola founded the first Christian infirmary in Rome, at the end of the fourth century. St. Paula, a Roman widow, in whose veins ran the blood of the Scipios, the Gracchi, and Paulus Æmilia, and of Agamemnon, was born in 347 A.D., and was one of the many noble Christian women who devoted their wealth and their lives to the poor, the suffering, and the helpless, in the early days of Christianity. She distributed immense alms, and built a hospital on the road to Jerusalem, and also a monastery for St. Jerome and his monks, whom she maintained, besides three monasteries for women;[528] she carried the sick to their beds in her arms, and with her own hands washed their wounds, as St. Jerome tells us. In Italy, Gaul, and Spain, many asylums for sick and poor persons were built and maintained. Nor were their benefits confined to Christians; for Jews, slaves, and freemen were welcomed to these temples of charity. It is impossible in the limits of this work to trace fully the progress of the hospital movement; enough has been said to prove, as Baas, the Agnostic historian of medicine, admits,[529] that “Hospitals proper, in our sense of the term, did not originate till Christian times.” When the plague raged at Alexandria, Eusebius tells us,[530] “Many of our brethren, by reason of their great love and brotherly charity, sparing not themselves, cleaved one to another, visited the sick without weariness or heed-taking, and attended upon them diligently, cured them in Christ, which cost them their lives, and being full of other men’s maladies, took the infection of their neighbours.” Such was the initial impulse which Christian charity applied to the healing art; trace we now its splendid results in mediæval times. In the Middle Ages almost all the monasteries and religious houses had a hospital of one kind or another attached to them; they had not only places of entertainment for pilgrims, but institutions for the treatment and care of the sick and poor. This care of the diseased and helpless was not left to the civil administration alone, but formed part of the regular work of the Church of the middle ages, and by ancient regulation this was placed under the control of the Bishops. The Council of Vienne ordained that if the administrators of a hospital, lay or clerical, became relaxed in the exercise of their charge, proceedings should be taken against them by the Bishops, who should reform and restore the hospital of their own authority.