TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Framework for a history of hospitals
Hospital narratives and case histories
1. Pre-Christian Healing Places
Dreaming of Asclepius: Ancient Greek Temple Healing
A divine summons to Pergamon
Asclepius and his cult
Temple healing: Ideology and patronage
Staging temple rituals
Aristides’ healing dreams
Collective Care of Soldiers and Slaves: Roman Valetudinaria
A young warrior becomes ill
Building a new professional army
Valetudinaria: Ideology and mission
Valetudinaria: Organization and staff
Soldiers and their care
Asclepieion and Valetudinarium: Confluence of the Sacred and Secular
2. Christian Hospitality: Shelters and Infirmaries
Early Christianity: A New Vision of the Sick
Edessa: famine, epidemics, and strangers
Christianity: Constructing a mission of healing
Christian welfare: Rise of the xenodocheion
“Slash and burn”: Caring for the sick
Healing at St. Gall: The Golden Age of Benedictine Monasticism
The abbot of St. Gall takes a fall
Benedict’s monasteries: Ora et Labora
Monastic caring spaces: Infirmary and hostel
Healing in monasteries: A community approach
The Twilight of Western Monastic Supremacy
3. Church and Laity: Partnership in Hospital Care
The Pantocrator Xenon of Constantinople
Tales of a feverish poet
Post-Justinian Byzantium: Society, medicine and xenones
Islam’s bimaristan and Christianity’s Pantocrator xenon
Theodoros Prodromos and life in the hospital
“Our Patients, Our Lords”: The Care of Pilgrims in Jerusalem
A pilgrimage to Jerusalem
Jerusalem and the Hospital of St. John: Mission and patronage
Feudal loyalty: Caring for “Our Lords the Sick”
St. John’s Hospital: Model for the world
Hospital Agendas in Peril: Corruption and Early Medicalization
4. Hospitals as Segregation and Confinement Tools: Leprosy and Plague
Leper Houses
A fateful second opinion
Views of leprosy and the construction of stigma
Locus of confinement: Anatomy of leper houses
Institutional rituals
Pesthouses or Lazarettos
Trastevere: Rome’s early plague spot
Framing and fighting plague: Pestilence and public health
Lazarettos: Makeshift isolation, cleansing and treatment
From Asclepius to San Bartholomeo: Purification rites
Framework for early medicalization
Welfare and Hospitals in Early Modern Europe
5. Enlightenment: Medicalization of the Hospital
Edinburgh, 1750-1800
Wanted: A letter of recommendation
Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh and its infirmary
Hospital patients and their management
House of teaching: Clinical instruction and research
Vienna, 1750-1800
Seeking care: A tailor’s fate
Joseph II and Vienna’s Allgemeines Krankenhaus
Johann Peter Frank: Hospital director and Brunonian practitioner
Clinicum practicum: The patient as teacher
6. Human Bodies Revealed: Hospitals in Post Revolutionary Paris
A former soldier seeks rest
Ancien Régime: Paris and its hospitals
Hospital reform: The fate of France’s “curing machines.’
Bedside and autopsy table: New approaches to disease
Physical diagnosis: Laennec and the stethoscope
Life at the Necker Hospital
Parisian hospitals: teaching and research
The patient’s body: Centerpiece of medical learning
7. Modern Surgery in Hospitals: Development of Anesthesia and Antisepsis
America: Warren and Anesthesia
Living in a voluntary American hospital
Philanthropy in Boston: The Massachusetts General Hospital
Management of pain: A professional goal
First amputation under ether anesthesia, 1846
The significance of ether anesthesia
Scotland: Lister and Antisepsis
From the Shetlands to Victorian Edinburgh
Hospitalism and the “new” nursing
Lister and the antiseptic system of surgery
Infirmary life: An eyewitness account
Providing aseptic surgery: A new role for hospitals
8. The Limits of Medical Science:
Hospitals in Fin-de-Siècle Europe and America
Typhoid Fever and Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, 1891
A bartender with fever
Hopkins and Billings: Genesis and gestation of a new hospital
Osler, physicians, and nurses
Life in the hospital: The healing power of water
Science and religion: partners in healing
Cholera and Eppendorf General Hospital, Hamburg, 1892
A frightful collapse
Eppendorf General Hospital: Model for the world?
Cholera and hospital caregivers
Back to water: Managing cholera at the Eppendorf Hospital
Aftermath
9. Main Street’s Civic Pride:
The American General Hospital as Professional Workshop
An automobile accident in 1930
“A public undertaking”: American hospitals after 1900
Madison, Wisconsin, and its general hospital
Who pays? “Hospital-hotels” face the Depression
A new national epidemic: Automobile accidents
Efficiency versus humanity: Hospital life at MGH
The road to financial health
10. Hospitals at the Crossroads:
Government, Society and Catholicism in America, 1950-1975
A sudden heart attack
Serving the community: Buffalo and Mercy Hospital
Catholic hospitals: “The fairest flowers of missionary endeavor’
Hospital life at Mercy Hospital, 1954
Another heart attack
The impact of Medicare
Catholic hospitals: Identity crisis and ethical guidelines
Wired for survival: Life in Mercy’s CCU
“Moving forward under God”
11. Hospitals as Biomedical Showcases:
Academic Health Centers and Organ Transplantation
Searching for a donor
From teaching hospitals to academic health centers
Quest for excellence: Moffitt Hospital and UCSF
Renal transplantation: Scientific, clinical, and professional contours
World class: Transplantation at UCSF
“Rebirth” at Moffitt Hospital
Making transplantation routine
12. Caring for the Incurable:
AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital
An early AIDS portrait: “Warren”
San Francisco General Hospital: Tradition and evolution
Framing AIDS in the early 1980s: Lifestyle, cancer or infection?
Who “owns” AIDS in San Francisco? Planning Ward 5 B
Gay pride: Patients’ rights and responsibilities
The art of nursing: Life in Ward 5 B
Managing death and dying
The lessons of AIDS
Conclusion
Towards the Next Millennium: The Future of Hospitals as Healing Spaces
Evolution of hospitals: A Profile
The new American spirituality
Consumerism in medicine
New managerial and financial imperatives
Hospitals and the humanity of institutional care
Index
