A period that did so much for social needs could scarcely be expected to have neglected its hospitals and as a matter of fact some of the most beautiful hospitals in the world were built in this period, and everywhere that a hospital was built it was worthy of its purpose. The hospitals of a later time, especially the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were little better than jails and were eminently unsuitable. At this time citizens, instead of thinking that anything was good enough for the ailing poor, felt that the honor of the city was concerned, and the hospital, being a municipal building, was { xxxix} constructed with as much care for its beauty externally and its utility internally as the famous town halls or churches of the time. We know how well patients were cared for, since we have abundant evidence of the clinical teaching of medicine at the bedside. Whenever hospitals are well built and the attendant physician takes students with him on his rounds, the best possible treatment of patients is assured. They cared finely for the insane also and for the weak-minded. The awful abuses in this regard that came in the eighteenth century, and from which our own happier though far from satisfactory conditions represent a reaction, were a lamentable, almost incomprehensible degeneration from the magnificent work of the earlier time.
The women of Columbus' Century are worthy in every way of a place beside the men of their time. Those who in recent years have talked of the nineteenth century as the first period in the world's history when women secured an opportunity for the higher education forget amazingly many phases of feminine education of the long ago. The University of Salerno had its department of women's diseases in the charge of women professors in the twelfth century. There were feminine professors at the University of Bologna in the thirteenth century, and as a matter of fact in no century since the twelfth has Italy been without distinguished women professors at one or more of the Italian universities.
Above all those who talk of feminine education as a recent evolution must be strangely forgetful of the women of the Renaissance. In Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, in England, there were long series of distinguished women, some noted for their scholarship, some for their artistic taste, some for their literary power, all of them for a fine influence on the men of the time and an inspiration to what was best. Much of the wonderful social history of the time is due to them, but there is no department of intellectual or moral uplift in which their names are not prominent. Vittoria Colonna, the D'Estes, the women of the House of Medici, the Gonzagas in Italy, Queen Anne of Bretagne and Marguerite of Navarre in France, Queen Isabella of Castile, Queen Catherine of England, Margaret More, Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Bourgogne, { xl} Lady Jane Grey, Queen Elizabeth--when was there ever such a galaxy of learned women alive during the same hundred years? Besides these known in secular literature there was St. Angela of Merici, the great founder of the Ursulines; St. Catherine of Genoa, the wonderful organizer of charity; St. Teresa, probably the greatest intellectual woman who ever lived, and other women distinguished for supreme qualities of mind and heart almost too numerous to mention.