Page:A short history of nursing - Lavinia L Dock (1920).djvu/113

The Dark Period in Nursing 97 In the long, consecrated life of St. Vincent we see a man whose social vision was so far ahead of his time that even yet the majority of his followers have not caught up with him. His lifework was a complete whole, and so we cannot come to the Sisters who especially concern our subject, until we have briefly touched upon the activities that led up to their creation. Vincent de Paul was a parish priest, a man of most simple, unpretending charac- ter and unbounded goodness and wisdom. He was born in 1576, and lived until 1660, through a period of widespread misery to which war, pesti- lence, famine, the destitution of religious refu- gees, and the horrors of industrial slavery all con- tributed. St. Vincent's study of social conditions, and his reflections, brought him to a most advanced point of view. Indeed many of his beHefs were then considered revolutionary. He was convinced that poverty could be abolished. Even in this day organized charities have but recently come to that doctrine, and in his own times, poverty was popu- larly regarded as a divine chastisement, or, at least, a discipline. He advocated thorough education for the young, including manual training and the teaching of skilled trades. To deal with beggary, at that time a real pest, he would have had farm 7