Using an innovative approach to evidence for the medieval hospital and medical practice, this collection of essays presents new research by leading international scholars in creating a holistic look at the hospital as an environment within a social and intellectual context. The research presented creates insights into practice, medicines, administration, foundation, regulation, patronage, theory, and spirituality. Looking at differing models of hospital administration between 13th century France and Spain, social context is explored. Seen from the perspective of the history of Knights of the Order of Saint Lazarus, and Order of the Temple, hospital and practice have a different emphasis. Extant medieval hospitals at Tonnerre and Winchester become the basis for exploring form and function in relation to health theory (spiritual and non-spiritual) as well as the influence of patronage and social context. In the case of the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, this line of argument is taken further to demonstrate aspects of the building based on a concept of epidemiology. Evidence for the practice of medicine presented in these essays comes from a variety of sources and approaches such as remedy books, medical texts, recorded practice, and by making parallels with folk medicine. Archaeological evidence indicates both religious and non religious medical intervention while skeletal remains reveal both pathology and evidence of treatment.

The first monograph on Islamic hospitals, this volume examines their origins, development, architecture, social roles, and connections to non-Islamic institutions.

In The Medieval Economy of Salvation, Adam J. Davis shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses. Focusing on the county of Champagne, he looks at the ways in which charitable organizations and individuals—townspeople, merchants, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics—saw in these new institutions a means of infusing charitable giving and service with new social significance and heightened expectations of spiritual rewards. In tracing the rise of the medieval hospital during a period of intense urbanization and the transition from a gift economy to a commercial one, Davis makes clear how embedded this charitable institution was in the wider social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric of medieval life.

Medical knowledge and practice changed profoundly during the medieval period. In this collection of over 100 primary sources, many translated for the first time, Faith Wallis reveals the dynamic world of medicine in the Middle Ages that has been largely unavailable to students and scholars. The reader includes 21 illustrations and a glossary of medical terms.

The first part of this collection brings together a selection of Peregrine Horden's papers on the history of hospitals and related institutions of welfare provision from their origins in Late Antiquity to their medieval flourishing in Byzantium and the Islamic lands as well as in western Europe. The hospital is seen in a variety of original contexts, from demography and family history to the history of music and the liturgy. The second part turns to the history of healing and medicine, outside the hospital as well as within it. These studies cover a period from Hippocratic times to the Renaissance, but with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region - Byzantine, Middle Eastern and Western - in the Middle Ages.

This book presents an engaging, detailed portrait of the people, ideas, and beliefs that made up the world of English medieval medicine between 750 and 1450, a time when medical practice extended far beyond modern definitions. The institutions of court, church, university, and hospital--which would eventually work to separate medical practice from other duties--had barely begun to exert an influence in medieval England, writes Faye Getz. Sufferers could seek healing from men and women of all social ranks, and the healing could encompass spiritual, legal, and philosophical as well as bodily concerns. Here the author presents an account of practitioners (English Christians, Jews, and foreigners), of medical works written by the English, of the emerging legal and institutional world of medicine, and of the medical ideals present among the educated and social elite. How medical learning gained for itself an audience is the central argument of this book, but the journey, as Getz shows, was an intricate one. Along the way, the reader encounters the magistrates of London, who confiscate a bag said by its owner to contain a human head capable of learning to speak, and learned clerical practitioners who advise people on how best to remain healthy or die a good death. Islamic medical ideas as well as the poetry of Chaucer come under scrutiny. Among the remnants of this far distant medical past, anyone may find something to amuse and something to admire.

The first English hospitals appeared soon after the Norman Conquest. By the year 1300 they numbered over 500, caring for the sick and needy at every level of society - from the gentry and clergy to pilgrims, travellers, beggars and lepers. Excluded from towns, but placed by main highways where they could gather alms, they had a complex relationship with medieval society: cherished yet marginalised, self-contained yet also parasitic. This book - the first general history of medieval and Tudor hospitals in eighty-five years - traces when and why they originated and follows their development through the crisis periods of the Black Death and the English Reformation when many disappeared. Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster explore the hospitals' religious, charitable and medical functions, examine their buildings, staffing and finances, and analyse their inmates in terms of social background and medical needs. They reconstruct the daily life of hospitals, from worship to living conditions, food and care. The general survey is complemented by a regional study of hospitals in the south-west of England, including detailed histories of all the recorded institutions in Cornwall and Devon.