Speculum hospitale

The Codex Calixtinus stolen from Santiago Cathedral's Library

2011-07-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Sorry to send this very discouraging new:

The Codex Calixtinus, one, if not, the most precious Medieval codex from the Spanish cultural heritage has been stolen from Santiago de Compostela Cathedral's Library. This is specially a very sad new for all hospital historians as its main content is kind of pilgrim's guide to Compostella produced in the 12th century.

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/Codice/Calixtino/sustraido/Catedral/Santiago/estaba/asegurado/elpepucul/20110707elpepucul_4/Tes

Teresa.

Hospital de la Santa Creu (Barcelona): Els llibres d'entrades de malalts, digitalitzats//Hospital of the Holy Cross (Barcelona): Patients' registers now on-line

2011-04-11T05:03:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends:

The National Library of Catalonia has digitised the patients' registers of the Hospital of Santa Creu [Holy Cross] from Barcelona, between 1457 and 1789.

http://mdc.cbuc.cat/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/hospstcreu

Very much looking forward you enjoying them.

Teresa.

---

Benvolguts amics:

Us informo que la Biblioteca de Catalunya ha digitalitzat els llibres d'entrades de malalts entre 1457 i 1768.

http://mdc.cbuc.cat/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/hospstcreu

Espero els disfruteu.

Teresa.

Un tast de Bibliografia/ A Bibliography's taste (II)

2010-09-03T04:11:00.000-07:00

Isenheim Altarpiece (Colmar, France)

Dear Friends,

Let's continue (thanks to collegues from Sciencia.cat, among others) with a selection of Bibliography on hospitals, the complete texts of which you can find on-line. Enjoy it!

Amics,

Continuem (entre d'altres, gràcies als amics de Sciencia.cat) amb la selecció de Bibliografia hospitalària que podreu trobar a la xarxa. A disfrutar-ho.

Echevarría Arsuaga, Ana, “Esclavos musulmanes en los hospitales de cautivos de la Orden Militar de Santiago (siglos XII y XIII)”, Al-Qantara: Revista de Estudios Árabes, 28, 2 (2007), 465-488.

García i Díez, Ferran, “La pobresa a Igualada i les deixes testamentàries a l'Hospital Sant Bartomeu (segles XIV-XV)”, Miscellanea Aqualatensia, 8 (1997), 101-142.

Gironella i Delgà, Anna, “La cultura de la caritat: inventari dels béns de l'Hospital de la Seu (Girona, 31 de gener 1342)”, Annals de l'Institut d'Estudis Gironins, 42 (2001), 163-177.

"Save History of Medicine at UCL" /Salvem la Història de la Medicina a UCL

2010-04-30T18:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

I have just read and signed the online petition "Save History of Medicine at UCL" (which I do copy below), distributed my Vivian Nutton, Emeritus Professor of History of Medicine, -a most admired mentor throughout my accademic life.

Dear Colleagues,

As many people will already know, on March 31, the Wellcome Trust abruptly announced that it intended to withdraw its funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, which would be closed completely on September 30, 2012. A similar statement followed from UCL.

You are invited to sign the petition against closure that is now online at

http://www.petitiononline.com/WTCHOM/petition.html

and to pass details of it on to others known to you who might also support our cause.

Further information is available on our website and the opportunity to comment on the closure can be found on http://friendsofwtchom.blogspot.com

With thanks for your support,

Vivian Nutton

Emeritus Professor of the History of Medicine

I personally agree with what this petition says, and I think you might

agree, too. If you can spare a moment, please take a look, and consider

signing yourself.

Best wishes,

Teresa Huguet-Termes

Duodecim quodlibet: Interviewing a hospital historian

2010-03-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

Interviewing Professor Peregrine Horden...

Dear friends and colleagues. Today we do start a new section on Speculum hospitale which aims to explore what do hospital historians (and other sort of openminded historians from other fields, as well) think about our fascinating discipline in an informal way. Twelve questions (honouring the twelve paupers privileged by a great number of Medieval and Early Modern hospital benefactors) will be put to a very interesting range of historians. Professor Peregrine Horden has been invited to inaugurate the section and has very kindly agreed to do so. Why starting by him? The answer is quite evident: he was the first historian to call 'hospital history' a 'discipline of rellevance', in 1988 (Social History of Medicine, 1 (1988): 359-374. Peregrine (if I may) is professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway (University of London). Within his interests are: the Social history of early medieval medicine in Europe and Byzantium; the history of the family; Mediterranean studies; environmental history and the theory and philosophy of history. See a selection of his publications at the end of the interview and click on, if you would like to read a recent and most fascinating paper What's wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?. I do hope you enjoy the questions and the answers. Let me say THANK YOU so much to Professor Peregrine Horden for his collaboration and let me hearthily recommend to you all one of his great books on hospitals, his latest one entitled: Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Further acknowledgement: To Phil Banks for his help reviewing my questions' English style!

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

1.
Teresa: How and why did you come across medieval hospitals?
Peregrine: I knew I wanted to research on some aspect of medieval social history, and at Cambridge, where I started a PhD, my supervisor, Walter Ullmann, gave me his article on the ‘public welfare’ provision of the early medieval councils. It grew from there!

2.
Teresa: You do point out usually the extent to which your (always sceptical, I know!) gaze at hospitals has been much influenced by social anthropology. My tricky question would be: The connection between anthropology and medieval hospital history lies in the idea/tool of mentalities (please do correct me if I am not right). If so, what about the fact of mentalities having changed since medieval times: is the connection still useful? Why?
Peregrine: I use social anthropology more to help me understand cultures of healing past and present, rather than hospitals specifically. It is not a question of establishing continuities over time so much as of enlarging the range of possibilities with which I am – from my armchair! – familiar. I wish we did have a full anthropological study of modern hospital life, perhaps from the developing world, but I have yet to find it.

3.
Teresa: I hate the word ‘model’ but let me ask you, just in case… Is there a ‘medieval hospital model’?
Peregrine: Not for me: they vary too much over time: those of the twelfth century in Europe are not the same as the fifteenth, the latter with their elaborate liturgical life.

4.
Teresa: Once I heard an Early Modernist saying that the only things that are worth ‘historicising’ are: economy, political institutions, the ‘high’ culture, and the foreign relationships. The rest, according to him, and especially ‘daily life’ - for instance - was just like fashion, that is something that goes down and up and leaves. What do you think a hospitals historian - you, for instance - would have liked to answer?
Peregrine: Fashion has its serious history, just like the hospital. Changes in both require searching explanation. That early modernist is an idiot.

5.
Teresa: Hospitals and the Mediterranean: James Brodman, in his book ‘Charity and the poor in Medieval Catalonia’, points to the fact of the lack of hospitals studies in the Iberian peninsula and the extent to which the Italian or French interpretations have exerted a most influential impact, perhaps a too influential impact. As an expert on the history of the Mediterranean, what kind of old or new issues do you think Iberian hospitals, rather than the above mentioned, could better illuminate, if any?
Peregrine: Perhaps the influence (or lack of influence) of Islamic foundations, the chronology of these ‘fashions’ in hospital foundation, the role of the state, the military orders, the Counter-Reformation … the list is endless. On all these we need an Iberian perspective!

6.
Teresa: Medieval hospitals + late medieval consolidation processes = the ‘new General Hospital’: can we truly speak of a rationale? If so, which are its main targets not yet explored?
Peregrine: We need a substitute for ‘the great confinement' – indeed a substitute for Foucault tout court – but not another simplistic formulation. I am not yet sure what should be put in its place.

7.
Teresa: After the Variorum compilation of your work on hospitals: what is your next study on hospitals about or what would you like to do go next?
Peregrine: I am still writing a worldwide comparaive study of hospitals up to c. 1100 CE!

8.
Teresa: Rituals of public-health and the Western city: I loved your paper on public-health and the city in the High Middle Ages and your ‘use’ of hospitals. And what about rituals inside medieval hospitals? What can they tell us about cities’ public health strategies?
Peregrine: Thank you! I hadn’t thought of hospital rituals in that way but the liturgical or sacramental ones from the later Middle Ages could be seen as microcosms of collective public health measures. As I’ve argued, there is more to public health history than cesspits and cemeteries.

9.
Teresa: A difficult question: What is the most fascinating paper/book on hospitals have you ever read?
Peregrine: I have always admired the articles and books of Carole Rawcliffe and John Henderson and most of my ideas are stolen from them.

10.
Teresa: Hospitals and landscape: What do you think hospitals can tell us about history of landscape? Is this a question that can only able to be addressed to rural hospitals?
Peregrine: No, I think hospitals can profoundly alter the urban landscape – or be thought to do so. Look at the cover of The Impact of Hospitals. I don’t feel historians have given enough attention to this. A theme for another INHH conference?!

11.
Teresa: A question on comparative Hospital History: What would it be worth to comparing, in your own, between hospitals? Where are the limits of comparing?
Peregrine: I think there are no inherent limitations. I have for instance been fascinated to compare the similar chronology of hospital foundations in twelfth-century Europe and Cambodia.

12.
Teresa: Where is the future of Hospital History? Where should it go next?
Peregrine: Ad fontes! We need many more archival studies of a quite traditional kind as well as renewed exploration of the political, economic, religious and topographical contexts.

PUBLICATIONS ON HOSPITALS, MEDICINE AND DISEASE:

Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

(ed. with John Henderson and Alessandro Pastore), The Impact of Hospitals 300-2000 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007)

(ed.), Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).

(co-author Nicholas Purcell), The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell's, 2000).

(co-editor, with Emilie Savage-Smith) The Year 1000: Medical Practice at the End of the First Millennium, special issue of Social History of Medicine, 13.2 (August 2000).

INHH 2011: Next international conference

2010-03-24T11:10:00.000-07:00

International Network for the History of Hospitals Sixth International Conference

Daily Life in the Hospital: Theory and Practice

School of Public Health. Lisbon and University of Evora

8-10 April 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

The INHH will be holding in 2011 its sixth international conference in Lisbon and Evora, Portugal, on the theme of Daily Life in the Hospital: Theory and Practice. It will follow the success of the previous INHH international conferences, the last of which took place in Barcelona in 2009.   It is intended, as on previous occasions, to include as wide a chronological and geographical remit as possible, embracing the history of hospitals from the Ancient world to the present century across the globe. One of the aims of the Network is to encourage scholars new to the subject (though, of course, not precluding established scholars) and to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach.   It is hoped that, as previously, papers will be published in a peer-reviewed volume based upon the conference proceedings.

Potential speakers are invited to submit proposals for papers of up to thirty minutes’ duration, suitable for inclusion in one of following sessions:

•    Making and breaking the rules: statutes, regulations and abuses
•    Doing the rounds: physicians, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists and their roles
•    Religious ritual
•    The routine of medicalisation: drugs, medicines, therapeutics and laboratories
•    Day to day administration: bureaucrats, accountants, auditors and managers
•    Organising the patient and patient organisations: the daily life of the young, old, pregnant, dying and insane

Please send a summary of your proposed paper in English (no more than the equivalent of a single side of A4), together with a brief curriculum vitae, as an e-mail attachment to Dr Christopher Bonfield at c.bonfield@uea.ac.uk by 15th May 2010 at the latest.   A current e-mail address, full postal address and details of institutional affiliation should also be supplied.

The local organisers have generously agreed to provide all speakers with accommodation and meals gratis and to waive the customary conference fee. However, it is expected that speakers will fund their own travel costs, other than for transport between Lisbon and Evora, for which no charge will be made.

Un tast de bibliografia/ A bibliography's taste.

2010-02-14T11:55:00.000-08:00

El nostre col·lega, Lluís Cifuentes, ànima i webmaster del portal Sciencia.cat recull i publica des de fa temps una extensa bibliografia en accés obert sobre la ciència en la cultura catalana a l'Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement i el seu context. Seguint el seu amable suggeriment, i a la nova secció 'Un tast de bibliografia', n'he extret un llistat dels treballs relacionats amb els hospitals medievals, tot afegint-ne alguns altres dels quals he tingut notícia darrerament. Us els aniré donant a conèixer, remetent-vos als enllaços que en Lluís ha recollit, si els articles es troben en accés obert. A la barra lateral del bloc trobareu gradualment noves seccions sobre 'Hospitals per població', 'Hospitals per advocació', 'Hospitals per província', 'Fundadors i benefactors' i 'historiadors hospitalaris'. A disfrutar-ho!

Our colleague, Lluís Cifuentes, soul and webmaster of the site Sciencia.cat, publishes an open access bibliography on science in the Catalan culture and its context during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Following his kind advice related to the new section 'A bibliography's taste', I have selected a list of work devoted to medieval hospitals and added some other references of my own. I will let them you know directing to the links Lluís has colected as long as the articles are open access. As you will see many of them are open access. In the right sidebar of the blog you will gradually find new sections on 'Hospitals by town', 'Hospitals by dedication', 'Hospitals by province' and 'Founders and benefactors'. Enjoy them!

Adell i Gisbert, Joan-Albert, “L'hospital de pobres de Santa Magdalena de Montblanc i l'arquitectura hospitalària medieval a Catalunya”, Acta Historica et Archaeologica Mediaevalia, 4 (1983), 239-263, il.

Aguiló i Aguiló, Estanislau de K., “Documents curiosos del sigle XIV / IX. Testament de Sayt Milí, juheu, fundador d’un hospital en el Call de Mallorca -- 16 agost de 1377”, Boletín de la Sociedad Arqueológica Luliana, 9 (1901-1902), 203-204.

Aguiló i Aguiló, Estanislau de K., “Fundació y documents relatius al Hospital de Santa Catalina dels Pobres”, Boletín de la Sociedad Arqueológica Luliana, 10 (1903-1904), 365-388.

Bartrina i Corominas, Enric, “Els quatre hospitals de Solsona”, Gimbernat, 49 (2008), 33-48.

Bernils i Mach, Josep M., “Historia del Hospital de Figueras (años 1313 a 1967)”, Annals de l'Institut d'Estudis Empordanesos, 6 (1966), 255-306.

Bordoy Bordoy, María José - Cruz Pérez, Esther, “Notes per a l'estudi de l'Hospital General de Mallorca (segles XIV-XVI)”, Gimbernat, 37 (2002), 113-130.

Brodman, James William, Charity and Welfare: Hospitals and the Poor in Medieval Catalonia, Filadèlfia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998, xxv + 229 pp.

Castejón, Nativitat, Aproximació a l'estudi de l'Hospital de la Santa Creu de Barcelona, Barcelona - Lleida, Fundació Noguera - Pagès, 2007, 434 pp.

Cateura Benàsser, Pablo, “Hospitales foráneos de Mallorca (siglos XIII-XV)”, Mayurqa, 19, 1 (1979), 113-124.

Conejo da Pena, Antoni, “L'antic hospital de Santa Magdalena de Montblanc”, Locus Amoenus, 6 (2002-2003), 129-143.

Continuarà!/ To be continued!

Missatge de benvinguda-Wellcome message

2009-10-25T05:52:00.000-07:00

Hospital d'Olesa de les Bones Valls. Foto: M. Toldrà

Amigues i amics,

Des de fa vora sis anys el meu interès per la història dels hospitals baixmedievals i de la primera època moderna ha anat in crescendo. En aquest marc, m'he dedicat bàsicament a l'estudi de dues àrees i períodes: el Madrid dels Àustries, i la Barcelona dels segles XIII-XVII. He de dir, però, que de manera generalitzada, llevat d'excepcions molt notables, que el bloc s'ocuparà de publicitar i honorar, no m'ha semblat ni que les autodenominades institucions d'alta cultura de casa nostra ni d'altres cases no tan nostres, hagin atorgat als nostres o bé als seus antics hospitals l'espai privilegiat (i no sols testimonial) que es mereixen en el marc d'això que en diuen els seus 'plans estratègics', sense parlar del menysteniment a què han estat sotmeses aquestes institucions en relació amb tot allò que representen per a la història i la cultura. Animada, tanmateix, per iniciatives reeixides que des d'aquí i des de més enllà de les nostres fronteres i amb mitjans sovint humils estan posant en valor hospitals –que esvaïts o no dels nostres paisatges, haurien d'importar als historiadors dels nostres dies– des de camps com la Història, l'Art, l'Arqueologia, la Toponímia, l'Arxivística, etc., començo un bloc que sense aspiracions grandiloqüents, però amb una clara vocació interdisciplinària i alliberadora, pretén tractar i donar a conèixer temes relacionats amb els antics hospitals de la Corona d'Aragó com ara notícies històriques, informació sobre els seus fons documentals, sobre els seus arxius, sobre els seus historiadors, sobre trobades nacionals i internacionals dedicades als hospitals o bé a temes relacionats i fins i tot sobre projectes de reconstrucció virtual d'espais d'aquest tipus, entre d'altres coses. Espero, doncs, contagiar-vos els meus ànims fins al punt que desitgeu acompanyar-me en aquesta fascinant aventura hospitalària i, també, que aquest bloc que òbviament serà també la vostra domus, es converteixi en un espai on us vingui de gust 'trastejar-hi' en la mesura dels vostres interessos i curiositat.

Gràcies i fins aviat!

Dear Friends,

For the last six years my interest on Late Medieval and Early Modern history of hospitals has been in crescendo. In this context, I have basically concentrated on the study of two periods and geographical areas: the Hapsburg Madrid, and Barcelona, (13th-17th centuries). I must say, however, that, in general, except for notable exceptions the blog will gave publicity to and honour, I think that no institutions of the so-called ‘high culture’ sort either from our nearer and not so nearer lands, have given to our hospitals and theirs the privileged place (and not just anecdotal) that they deserve in the context of what they call their 'strategic reserarch lines'. Otherwise, there is no need to mention the obscurity which, unfortunately, these institutions have undergone in relation to History and Culture. Encouraged, however, by successful initiatives that from here and from beyond our borders, and often with humble means, are putting in value hospitals, that, thought vanished from our landscape, must be important the 21st century historians - from fields such as History, Art, Archeology, Toponymy, Archivistics, etc., I do start a blog which does not aim grand aspirations, but a clear interdisciplinary and liberating purpose, by seeking to raise awareness on topics related to the old hospitals of the Crown of Aragon such as news on historical sources, information on their historians, on national and international meetings devoted to issues related to hospitals or even on virtual reconstruction projects of their spaces, among other things. I hope you also get encouraged about this to the point of desiring to come with me along this fascinating hospital adventure and also that this blog -by becaming also your domus-, is a place you might choose to ‘walk around’ as much as your interest and curiosity get catched.

Thanks and I will be back soon!