FABIOLA, A FOURTH CENTURY ROMAN LADY, AND THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRST PUBLIC HOSPITAL

Public hospitals for Roman citizens were established in many Roman cities during the early Christian era; the first of which was established at Rome in the fourth century by a Christian lady named Fabiola, as follows.

The origin of public hospitals is remarkable, and not generally known. Ecclesiastical history informs us, that this, perhaps the grandest and most successful effort for alleviating human misery, arose from no common species of benevolence, but from the impulse of singular piety upon the sensibility of a female mind, softened by a series of domestic afflictions, and urged by the desire of atoning for imaginary guilt. In the fourth century, a Roman lady, of a noble birth, by name Fabiola, by religion a Christian, left by the death of her husband in sole possession of an affluent fortune, was the first who built an infirmary for the reception of the sick and houseless, where they were supplied with every comfort. Jerom[e] calls her the glory of the Christians, the wonder of the Gentiles! The account which he gives of her is this: Divorced from her first husband, who proved an abandoned libertine, during the life of the first she married a second husband, who was sincerely attached to her, and whom she survived. Among the melancholy reflections consequent upon his death, being led to conceive her second marriage criminal, she voluntarily underwent a solemn penance, assumed the plainest dress, defaced her beauty, submitted to the meanest drudgery, sold her estates, which were answerable to her noble birth, and converted them into money, for the relief of the poor, and was the first to build an infirmary, into which sick and distressed objects of every description were collected from the streets. Many who were afflicted with distempers, the most loathsome and offensive she attended in person, carried them in her arms, bathed their sores, moistened the lips of the dying with her own hands, and so tenderly assuaged their miseries, that many who were well envied the sick. Rome was a scene too confined for her charity; she visited, either in person or by her deputies, all the country round, and even crossed the sea in quest of new objects of compassion. At length she took a sudden and unexpected resolution of visiting Jerusalem; on which occasion she was entertained a short time by Jerom[e] in his retreat in Bethlehem. She returned to Rome, and devoted all her property and all her time to relieving the sick and the indigent till she died. Her funeral is said to have been attended by a more numerous concourse, and with a zeal infinitely more fervent, than the triumphs of Scipio or Pompey.

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