The same can be said of the hospitals connected with the convents. They were not like some of the public hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in many of the large cities of Europe--repulsive, prison-like structures, with narrow windows and devoid of light and air and the most necessary hygienic appliances--institutions that were hospitals in name, but which were in reality too frequently breeding places of disease and death.[191] Unlike these, the hospitals presided over by nuns of the type of Hildegard were splendid roomy structures with large windows and abundance of light, pure air, with special provisions for the privacy of the patients, and with sanitary arrangements that not only precluded the dissemination of disease but which contributed materially to those marvelous cures which the good people of the time attributed to supernatural agencies rather than to the medical knowledge and skill of the devoted nuns,[192] who were the real conquerors of disease and death. But the inmates of the cloister were not the only women who, during the Middle Ages, achieved distinction by their writings on medical subjects and by their signal success in the practice of the healing art. In various parts of Europe, but especially in Italy and France, there were at this time among women, outside as well as inside convent walls, many daughters of Aesculapius and sisters of Hygeia who stood in such high repute among their contemporaries that they received the same honors and emoluments as were accorded to their masculine colleagues. This was particularly the case in Salerno, which was the venerated mother of all Christian medical schools, and which, for nine centuries, was universally regarded as "the unquestioned fountain and archetype of orthodox medicine." Situated on the Gulf of Salerno, and laved by the cerulean waters of the Tyrrhenian sea, the _Civitas Hippocratica_, as it was called on its medals, rejoiced in a salubrious climate, and was celebrated throughout the world as the "City sacred to Phoebus, the sedulous nurse of Minerva, the fountain of physic, the votary of medicine, the handmaid of Nature, the destroyer of disease and the strong adversary of death."[193] For to this favored city flocked from all quarters the lame and the halt and those afflicted with the tortures of disease and the disabilities of advancing years. The noble and the simple, crowned heads as well as the poorest of the poor, were found there, all of them in quest of life's most precious boon--health and strength.