"But so far as the accomplishment of the task set one is concerned, the attendant in the hospital has ever and anon new demands made upon him and a new task imposed. One patient lies next the other, and when one departs another comes in his place. "From day to day, from week to week, from year to year, always the same work, over and over again, only forever for new patients. This tires out the hospital attendant. Then the custom of seeing suffering weakens the enthusiasm and lessens the sense of duty. There is need of a special stimulus in order to reawaken the old sympathy. Whence shall this be obtained--from religion or from some temporal reward? In trying to solve this problem we are standing before the most difficult problem of modern hospital management. Before us lie the paths of religious and simple care for the sick. We may say at once that the proper solution has not yet been found. "It may be easy, from an impartial but one-sided view of the subject, to say that the feeling of duty, of devotion, even of sacrifice, is by no means necessarily dependent on the hope of religious reward, nor the expectation of material remuneration. Such a point of view, however, I may say at once, such a freedom of good will, such a warmth of sympathy from purely human motives as would be expected in these conditions, are only to be found in very unaccustomed goodness of {264} disposition, or an extent of ethical education such as cannot be found in most of those who give themselves at the present time to the services of the sick in the hospitals. If pure humanity is to be a motive, then other circles of society must be induced to take part in the care of the sick. Our training schools for nurses must teach very differently to what they do at present, if the care of the sick in municipal hospitals shall compare favorably with that given them in religious institutions. Our hospitals must become transformed into true humanitarian institutions." While some of this striking opinion of Virchow's was derived from personal experience with hospitals managed by religious, it must not be forgotten that such hospitals are rarer in Germany, at least in the north, than almost anywhere else in the world. His opportunities then were limited, and undoubtedly much of his favorable persuasions in this regard was founded on his investigation of conditions as he had learned to know them in the old-time hospitals of the later Middle Ages. The traditions as to the treatment of patients in these early times are such as to make us believe that hospital attendants did take their work seriously from a very lofty motive, and that while medicine and surgery were much less effective than in more modern times, the tender care of patients did as much as was possible to make inevitable suffering more bearable, and to keep the sight of painfully approaching death from being a source of discouragement and even of despair.