MODERN NURSING. 775 



that time Italian and German merchants initiated the great combina- 

 tions of the several orders of Hospital Brothers. 



Their efforts were not isolated or altogether premature. For there 

 existed a humanistic movement among the better classes of the Occi- 

 dent, on a Christian basis it is true, but spontaneous. Particularly in 

 the cities, societies were formed for the purpose of nursing the sick 

 and aiding the forlorn. Guy, of Montpellier, France, established a 

 hospital in that city, Of larger size, while up to that time all the insti- 

 tutions of a similar character were small and unavailing, and located 

 outside the walls. The new hospital in Montpellier, and seven more 

 French houses, and two under the same direction in Rome, are first 

 mentioned in a bull of Pope Innocent III, in the year 1198. The 

 secular character of the institutions was at that time fully recognized. 

 In connecting four clergymen with them he commanded that they 

 were to attend to spiritual duties only ("sine contradictione et murmu- 

 ratione "), and not to interfere with the office of the superiors. In 

 1204 the same pope recognized the newly established Hospital of the 

 Holy Ghost, on the old Tiber bridge, in Rome. With the peculiar 

 mixture of ferocity and mildness so common to the mediaeval age, the 

 same man who humiliated emperors, dethroned kings, and persecuted 

 the French heretics with fire and sword to extermination, looked for 

 the helpless and sick in the streets and saved illegitimate babies from 

 their watery graves. Guy de Montpellier's creation, the Order of the 

 Holy Ghost, did not remain long in its original condition. Pope 

 Gregory X (1271-'7G) subjected all the houses belonging to the order 

 to the one located in Rome, the first step in the attempt at depriv- 

 ing the order and its hospitals of their secular supervision. It was 

 finally disposed of by the bull of Pope Sixtus IV, of the 21st of 

 March, 1477. Meanwhile and afterward the order spread over all 

 Europe. With its increasing wealth and power it degenerated in the 

 seventeenth century. Though clerical by name, it was the most secu- 

 lar of all the institutions of dissipation. Grand-master and officers 

 lived on the fat of the land and their immense income. In vain Louis 

 XIV attempted to abolish it. The only change French royalty could 

 work was its transmutation into a royal order. In some of the prov- 

 inces laymen had succeeded, however, in controlling the management. 

 Thus it was in many parts of Germany, where, between 1400 and 

 1600, several of the institutions belonging to the order were secular- 

 ized. In Italy, however, the Order of the Holy Ghost remained exclu- 

 sively clerical. As late as in the beginning of the eighteenth century 

 it had great possessions in Europe and the West Indies. 



The Order of St. Elizabeth was founded in 1225 by Elizabeth, 

 daughter of Andrew II of Hungary, and wife of Landgrave Ludwig of 

 Thuringia. Women need not complain that domestic virtues do not 

 warm more than their own home, and do not immortally challenge the 

 admiration of posterity. Her name will never die, when many a great 



