In the classical world of Greece and Rome, neither philosophy nor religion encouraged a compassionate response to human suffering. Graeco-Roman values had no religious impulse for charity that involved personal concern for the ill. As a result there were no pre-Christian institutions that served the purpose that hospitals were created to serve, namely, the offering of charitable aid, particularly health care, to those in need. During times of plague the sick and dying were abandoned, and corpses were often left unburied in order to prevent the spread of contagion. The distinctive Christian contribution to healing was the element of compassionate care of the suffering, which focused on the sick, particularly on the sick poor. The Christian church created the only organization in the Roman world that systematically cared for its sick. The earliest hospitals were created in the late fourth century and spread quickly, first throughout the eastern Roman Empire, then to Rome, where the first hospital was founded by Fabiola, a Christian noblewoman. Hospitals offered palliative care and sometimes (in the eastern Roman Empire) medical treatment for the sick poor, while most who could afford it were cared for in their own homes. The hospital was one of the few institutions in Europe that survived the fall of the Roman Empire and flourished in the Middle Ages, maintained most often by monastic orders. The Christian emphasis on compassionate care continued until the end of the nineteenth century. The professionalization of medicine and hospitals, together with the descralization of medicine, gradually lessened its influence.