No wonder that the news of this godlike work was soon wafted to the uttermost bounds of the earth; that, in the words of St. Jerome, "summer should announce in Britain what Egypt and Parthia had learned in the spring." No wonder that the same eloquent hermit of Bethlehem should proclaim the foundress of this home of the indigent and the afflicted to be "the glory of the church, the astonishment of the Gentiles, the mother of the poor and the consolation of the saints." No wonder that, in contemplating her countless acts of charity, he should ignore the fact that Fabiola was a daughter of the Fabii and a descendant of the renowned Quintus Maximus, who, by his sage counsel, had saved his country from her enemies, and that, recalling the words of Virgil, he should declare: "If I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and iron lungs, I should not be able to enumerate all the maladies to which Fabiola gave the most prodigal care and tenderness--to the extent even of making the poor who were in health envy the good fortune of those who were sick."[185] No wonder that Fabiola's funeral, which brought together the whole of Rome, was more like an apotheosis than the transfer of the remains of the deceased to their last resting-place, and that Jerome should declare, "the glory of Furius and Papirius and Scipio and Pompey, when they triumphed over the Gauls, the Sammites, Numantia and Pontus" was less than that which was spontaneously accorded to Fabiola, the solace of the sick and the comforter of the distressed. For she had in her hospital at Ostia established a type of institution that was to effect more for ameliorating the condition of suffering humanity than anything that had before been dreamed of; something that was to contribute immensely to the efforts of physicians and surgeons in minimizing the sad ravages of wounds and disease; something whose beneficent effects were to be felt through the centuries and in every part of the world down to the wards of the military hospital at Scutari, guarded by the watchful eyes of Florence Nightingale, and to the leper-tenanted lazarettos, blessed by the ministrations of Father Damien and the Sisters of Charity, on the desolate shores of plague-stricken Molokai.