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991:
INVENTION OF THE HOSPITAL
by John H. Lienhard
The new nations of Islam followed suit in the 9th century AD. By the
12th century, the Christian Order of St. John of Jerusalem, and the St.
Augustine nuns, had shaped Medieval hospitals, with their diverse
functions, into fine institutions.
Deterioration set in as control shifted away from the Church during the
late 13th century. Secular hospitals grew increasingly crowded and
dirty. Hospitals remained, but the well-to-do didn't use them. Small
wonder that, in 1642, Sir Thomas Browne would write,
But it took another force to make hospitals a place you would enter
willingly. That force was Florence Nightingale. She restored the
ingredient that'd left hospitals in the 13th century -- the ingredient was a
place for women. Before 1850, a nurse stood on a lower rung of the
social ladder than a trollop.
When Nightingale was done, not only women's place in hospitals, but
hospitals themselves, had been re-civilized. Hospitals as we know them
didn't really exist until after the Crimean War. It was only then that
Elizabeth Barret Browning could write,
(Theme music)
Sources for this episode are widely scattered. See the Encyclopaedia
Britannica articles on hospitals, and Saint John of Jerusalem. Stanley
Joel Reiser discusses the origins of hospitals in his chapter on Medical
Specialism and the Centralization of Medical Care. Medicine and the
Reign of Technology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Pennsylvania Hospital is the subject of a recent article in Colonial
Homes, (Colonial Health Care. February, 1995, pp. 48-51.) The
Browning quote is from Aurora Leigh, Book II. The Sir Thomas Brown
quote is from Religio Medici, Part II, Sect. IX.