446 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



likely to think that this is the first time in the world's history that the 

 building of hospitals has been brought to such a climax of development, 

 and that the houses for the ailing in the olden time were mere refuges, 

 prone to become death traps and at most makeshifts for the solution 

 of the problem of the care of the ailing poor. This is true for the 

 hospitals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it is not true 

 at all for the hospitals of the thirteenth and fourteenth and fifteenth 

 centuries. Miss Nutting and Miss Dock in their " History of Nurs- 

 ing"^ have called attention to the fact that the lowest period in hos- 

 pital development is during the eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- 

 turies. Hospitals were little better than prisons, they had narrow 

 windows, were ill provided with light and air and hygienic arrange- 

 ments and in general were all that we should imagine old-time hospitals 

 to be. The hospitals of the earlier time, however, had fine high ceil- 

 ings, large windows, abundant light and air, excellent arrangements 

 for the privacy of patients, and in general were as worthy of the archi- 

 tects of the earlier times as the municipal buildings, the cathedrals, 

 the castles, the university buildings and every other form of construc- 

 tion that the late medieval centuries devoted themselves to. 



The trouble with those who assume that there was no study of science 

 and practically no attention to nature study in the Middle Ages is that 

 they know nothing at all about the works of the men who wrote in the 

 medieval period at first hand. They have accepted declarations with 

 regard to the absolute dependence of the scholastics on authority, their 

 almost divine worship of Aristotle, their utter readiness to accept 

 authoritative assertions provided they came with the stamp of a mighty 

 name, and then their complete lack of attention to observation and 

 above all to experiment. Nothing could well be more ridiculous than 

 this ignorant assumption of knowledge with regard to the great teach- 

 ers at the medieval universities. Just as soon as there is definitie 

 knowledge of what these great teachers wrote and taught, not only 

 does the previous mood of blame for them for not paying much more 

 attention to science and nature at once disappear, but it gives place to 

 the heartiest admiration for the work of these great thinkers. It is 

 easy to appreciate then, what Professor Saintsbury said in a recent vol- 

 ume on the thirteenth century. 



And there have even been in these latter days some graceless ones who 

 have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century after an equal interval 

 will be of any more positive value — whether it will not have even less com- 

 parative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the 

 thirteenth. 



Three men were the great teachers in the medieval universities at 

 their prime. They have been read and studied with interest ever since. 

 They wrote huge tomes, but men have pored over them in every genera- 



*New York, Putnam, 1908. 



