The Renaissance hospital: healing the body and healing the soul

Abstract

This study surveys Florentine hospitals from their earliest appearances around the year 1000 to the reforms of Cosimo I in 1542. It concentrates, however, on the period after the Black Death from 1348 up to the 16th century, when sources such as hospital accounts, pharmacy books, and the tax registers of medical practitioners either became available for the first time or increased considerably in number. The book offers a holistic account of the hospital. Throughout, author emphasizes the hospital’s dual concerns: healing the body and healing the soul. Renaissance hospitals, with their cloisters and high ceilings, and their practices, with the staff washing the feet of patients in imitation of Christ, are exposed in their duality, fulfilling currently perceived dicta of medical theory and spiritual ends. To be sure, the hospital was not a Renaissance invention. In fact, more hospitals were founded in Florence from the mid-13th to the mid-14th century than at any other time. Nor were hospitals before the plague exclusively of the kind that offered lodging and food to pilgrims and the poor, without regard for medical care. In fact, author traces the origins of the medicalization of the medieval hospital to the 1330s and 1340s, when physicians, surgeons, and other health practitioners first became regular members of the staff. Nonetheless, the Black Death and the periodic appearances of the disease thereafter spurred the transformation of the hospital from an enterprise that focused predominantly on hospitality to one that provided medical care.