. This
barber's apprentice, who despised the schools and wrote in the
vernacular, made other important improvements in the surgeon's
technique. It is noteworthy that each discovery was treated as a trade
secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practitioners and not
given freely to the good of mankind.

In obstetrics Pare also made discoveries that need not be detailed
here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended
in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was
the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal
tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The
admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a considerable
improvement in method.

[Sidenote: Lunacy]

The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or
otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania.
Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and
made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of
the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and
which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings
before whom the plays were first produced.

[Sidenote: Hospitals]

As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals at Florence. He tells
how beautiful they were, how clean and well served by honorable matrons
tending the poor freely all day without making known their names and at
night returning home. Such institutions were the glory of Italy, for
they were sadly to seek in other lands. When they were finally
established elsewhere, they were too often left to the care of ignorant
and evil menials. The stories one may read of the Hotel-Dieu, at
Paris, are fairly hair-raising.

{515}

CHAPTER XI

THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION

SECTION 1. THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY

[Sidenote: Reformation and economic revolution]

Parallel with the Reformation was taking place an economic revolution
even deeper and more enduring in its consequences. Both Reformation
and Revolution were manifestations of the individualistic spirit of the
age; the substitution, in the latter case, of private enterprise and
competition for common effort as a method of producing wealth and of
distributing it. Both were prepared for long before they actually
upset the existing order; both have taken several centuries to unfold
their full consequences, and in each t