Szpitale diecezji kamienieckiej około 1830 roku

Abstract

In the Old Polish period hospitals were not institutions where the ill were treated but rather the places were responsible for providing care for those who needed help. The situation was similar about 1830. There were a lot of factors which had an essential influence on condition of hospitals and charity in the Diocese of Kamyantes about 1830; the factors were: dispersion of believers, poverty prevailing among Podolian presbyteries and cloisters, as well as strictly connected with the poverty of believers: farm nobility, few Polish townspeople, and Polish peasantry which colonized land ruined by Turks. The fall of the Republic and anti-Polish and anti-Catholic policy of czar’s authorities deepened processes of pauperizations believers of the Catholic Church. Taking all these factors into consideration, we ought to be surprised at the poor shape of parish hospitals and almost complete lack of church hospitals which above all would treat the ill (they were only in Gródek). Looking after a few dozens of the ill in 30 hospitals, with money coming from almost only from the alms, ought to be regarded as huge success of that society. The funds which parsons and superiors of cloisters had in their disposal influenced on condition of buildings, a number of people living in them, quality of their daily food and clothes which they could have at their disposal. It is also necessary to underline that on Podolia the process of disappearing of parish hospital shelters which began on the turn of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries on lands inhabited mostly by Poles.