338 A Short History of Nursing This is clearly shown if we compare the curve of medical development with that of nursing. In ancient Greece, where medicine first reached a rather high status as a branch of natural science, we find no corresponding development at all in nursing, and when medicine declined in the early- centuries of the Christian era, nursing was just beginning to flourish as a branch of religious ser- vice. So far as the relative status of the two vo- cations is concerned, the nursing orders of the church all through the early Middle Ages enjoyed a greater authority in the care of the sick and a higher intellectual and social status than the crude barber surgeon or the illiterate vendor of physic who represented the secular profession of medicine. With the revival of learning and the later scien- tific developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, medicine and surgery began to take on new life, but this had no effect in arresting the decline and demoralization of nursing. Medicine did, however, gain more or less complete control of the whole secular nursing system, with results which cannot be said to have been beneficial to either'. The shameless subordination and exploita- tion of nursing at this time practically destroyed all the life there was in it, and it will be noted that
