Indeed, Virchow's tribute to Pope Innocent III. as the initiator of all this humanitarian work is so frank and outspoken that, coming as it does from a man whose sympathies with the Papacy were well known to be the slightest, it deserves to be recalled in its completeness, in order that another factor for the vindication of Innocent's character may be better known. The great pathologist said: "The beginning of the history of all of these German hospitals is connected with the name of that Pope who made the boldest and farthest-reaching attempt to gather the sum of human interests into the organization of the Catholic Church. The hospitals of the Holy Ghost were one of the many means by which Innocent III. thought to hold humanity to the Holy See. And surely it was one of the most effective. Was it not calculated to create the most profound impression to see how the mighty Pope, who humbled emperors and deposed kings, who was the unrelenting adversary of the Albigenses, turned his eyes sympathetically upon the poor and sick, sought the helpless and the neglected upon the streets, and saved the illegitimate children from death in the waters! There is something at once conciliating and fascinating in the fact, that at the very time when the fourth crusade was inaugurated through his influence, the thought of founding a great {258} organization of an essentially humane character, which was eventually to extend throughout all Christendom, was also taking form in his soul; and that in the same year (1204) in which the new Latin Empire was founded in Constantinople, the newly erected hospital of the Holy Spirit, by the old bridge on the other side of the Tiber, was blessed and dedicated as the future centre of this organization." [Footnote 31] [Footnote 31: Virchow's article on the German hospitals is to be found in the second volume of his collection of essays on Public Medicine and the History of Epidemics, which is, unfortunately, not translated into English, so far as I know, but will have to be consulted in the original Gesammelte Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiete der Oeffentlichen Medicin und der Seuchenlehre von Rudolf Virchow, Berlin, 1879. August Hirschwald.]