One of the most exclusive well-known clubs is The Knights Malta inner sanctum which requires proof of noble blood and is said to number 16,000. There are hundreds and thousands of clubs and a network that connects them. I call them all by the word ‘octopus’. The Eastern Establishment, including Wolf’s Head, the ‘Porc’ and PNAC or Straussian neo-cons as derived from Physiocrats and Dupont de Nemours or other Merovingians are a major part of many of my books so I need not go into it further here. I bring it up just to illustrate that the next quote is entirely funny from an historical perspective even though it does tell a little truth. I suspect no ulterior motive from these authors who simply do not know much about the Knights.
Religion and Medicine:
“Monasteries also began to establish relationships with physicians and barber-surgeons, calling them in for medical consultations, and sometimes establishing regular contracts with physicians to be on call at the hospices. The physician was purely an adviser, however, and his prescriptions might be disregarded at will by nurse, priest, or patient.
While Christian Europe was moving deeper into a dark age, and Hindu India was forgetting its Buddhist medical traditions, the Islamic world was building a golden age of medicine. Much knowledge from the ancient world had been preserved in the Near East by people who had fled persecution by Romans and Christians. There it was combined with medical learning from India. Moslem hospitals were set up on the Indian model, with nurses (usually young men or older women) joining physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries (pharmacists) as part of medical teams. Wherever Islam spread, the conquerors built extensive hospital systems. Their western center at Córdoba, Spain, was said to have had over 500 hospitals and a library of over 100,000 medical manuscripts. Later, as Islam declined, so did its hospital system and the practice of nursing. But the medical knowledge the Islamic culture preserved and enhanced passed back to Europe through a variety of contacts, especially medical universities in Spain (attended by some monks) and military nursing orders that were founded in the Near East during the Crusades.
The earliest, and perhaps the most famous, of these nursing orders was the Knights of St. John, often called the Hospitalers, who built their first hospital in Jerusalem in 1050. The original intention of the Knights Hospitalers was to provide a church, monastery, and hospital for the use of pilgrims passing through Moslem territory to visit the Holy Land. But as the Crusades developed, these Knights took upon themselves not only the care of the sick and wounded but also military action. They established hospitals at key points along pilgrimage and crusade routes, and often donned armor to defend them.
Originally the Knights Hospitalers were all nobles, whose families were ‘never’ to have engaged in trade or menial work. While at first a secular order, they adopted monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and a promise to be ‘the serf and the slave’ of their lords, the sick. In keeping with this promise, patients were served food of their choice on silver plates, with linen provided in abundance, and were given boots and sheepskin cloaks to wear to and from the outside latrines…
Unfortunately, while interest in anatomy and surgery was reviving in Italy and southern France, new universities in northern Europe, especially in Paris, Oxford, Prague, and Vienna, were pursuing a different course. There the universities, although supposedly secular, were very much under the domination of the Christian church… (Women were barred from northern universities, as they were later from southern ones.) {Which would have been after the Cathars were genocidally eliminated even though the Knights Templar who are the co-created Priory outreach alongside the Knights Malta/ Hospitaliers had tried to bring Enlightenment to the world under direction of the Hibernians who had many double agents like St. Bernard inside the Churchian behemoth.}� (7)