Comparative studies of medical specialization in Orthodox and Catholic monasteries. Preliminary remarks

Abstract

Comparative studies of medical specialization in Orthodox and Catholic monasteries. Preliminary remarks. The article is dedicated to the problem of the genesis of hospitals and specialization of some Catholic and Orthodox monasteries in the provision of medical care and other charitable activities. The relevance of the topic is dictated by the difficulty in explaining the phenomenon of the Orthodox Trinity Hospital Monastery in Kyiv outside the context of the history of Rus as a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Orthodox monasteries are not characterized by the reflection in their name of the monastery’s implied charitable function. The problems of historiography relating to the monastery as a medical institution are discussed in the article. It focuses how the imperial concept of historical development prevails in post-Soviet countries, also either West European connections or regional features is taken little into account. Despite the meager available source base, posing the question makes it possible to identify promising areas of research, such as a comparison of the charters of Orthodox and Catholic monasteries with regard to the care of patients, dependence of specialized church institutions on public health policy, dynamics of the evolution of hospitals in Catholic and Orthodox monasteries, an architectural and spatial structure of medical units there, monastic view of disease and medical practice, which highlight the issues of the monasteries’ social role and their functioning during epidemics.