La modernización del hospital y la educación médica. El caso de España en perspectiva histórica

Abstract

IntroductionIn Spain, hospital underwent a long and tortuous transformation from a charitable establishment aimed at the poor where the therapeutic inefficiency and death reigned, into a scientific institution with the following functions: healthcare, teaching and research. This new conception of hospital, linked to the birth of the clinic (to follow the analyses by Foucault and Ackerknecht) and to the development of hospitals as spaces of medicalization, led to the consolidation of the idea that hospital was the right place to enact the ideal of a physician based on the new way of training of medical professionals. MethodsThe article identifies historical factors that, in the period ranging from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, led to the emergence of modern, rationalized hospital in Spain and to the consolidation of the new conception of hospital as a scientific institution, in which medical training was one of the main aims. ResultsThe Spanish case shows a number of specific patterns. First and foremost, the hospital reform emerged and consolidated later than in many countries in Europe and North America. ConclusionsIn Spain, the process of reform and modernization of hospitals and of medical training did not occur systematically until the 1960s. This article focuses on the precedents and on the first stages of the process in the period from the end of the eighteenth- to the early twentieth century.