sinful youth and conversion to Christianity, is widely considered to be the first autobiography of ever written in the canon of Western Literature. Augustine profoundly influenced the coming medieval worldview. The Summa Theologica, written 1265–1274, is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), and although unfinished, "one of the classics of the history of philosophy and one of the most influential works of Western literature." It is intended as a manual for beginners in theology and a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Church. It presents the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West. The epic poetry of the Italian Dante and his Divine Comedy of the late Middle Ages is also considered immensely influential. The English statesman and philosopher, Thomas More, wrote the seminal work Utopia in 1516. St Ignatius Loyola, a key figure in the Catholic counter-reformation, is the author of an influential book of meditations known as the Spiritual Exercises. Catholics have also given greater value to the world through literary works by Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Dryden, Walker Percy, Jack Kerouac, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Pope, Honoré de Balzac, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Merton, Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway, J.R.R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, Claude McKay, Paul Verlaine, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, Tennessee Williams, Francois Mauriac, Flannery O'Connor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Claudel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Michel de Montaigne, Siegfried Sassoon, John Henry Newman, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Rimbaud, Joseph Conrad, Miguel de Cervantes, Czeslaw Milosz, Hilaire Belloc, John of the Cross, Luis Vaz De Camoes, Edith Sitwell, Thomas More, among others. Medicine and health care The administration of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires split and the demise of the Western Empire by the 6th century was accompanied by a series of violent invasions and precipitated the collapse of cities and civic institutions of learning, along with their links to the learning of classical Greece and Rome. For the next thousand years, medical knowledge would change very little. A scholarly medical tradition maintained itself in the more stable East, but in the West, scholarship virtually disappeared outside of the Church, where monks were aware of a dwindling range of medical texts. Hospitality was considered an obligation of Christian charity and bishops' houses and the valetudinaria of wealthier Christians were used to tend the sick. And the legacy of this early period was, in the words of Porter, that "Christianity