story 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
Nursing"[36] have called attention to the fact that the lowest period in
hospital development is during the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. Hospitals were little better than prisons, they had narrow
windows, were ill provided with light and air and hygienic arrangements,
and in general were all that we should imagine old-time hospitals to be.
The hospitals of the earlier time, however, had fine high ceilings,
large windows, abundant light and air, excellent arrangements for the
privacy of patients, and in general were as worthy of the architects of
the earlier times as the municipal buildings, the cathedrals, the
castles, the university buildings, and every other form of construction
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 at first hand about the works of the men who wrote
in the medieval period. 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 teachers at
the medieval universities. Just as soon as there is definite 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 volume on
the thirteenth century:

And there have even been in these latter days some gracel