ABSTRACT
The first part of this collection brings together a selection of Peregrine Horden's papers on the history of hospitals and related institutions of welfare provision from their origins in Late Antiquity to their medieval flourishing in Byzantium and the Islamic lands as well as in western Europe. The hospital is seen in a variety of original contexts, from demography and family history to the history of music and the liturgy. The second part turns to the history of healing and medicine, outside the hospital as well as within it. These studies cover a period from Hippocratic times to the Renaissance, but with a particular focus on the Mediterranean region - Byzantine, Middle Eastern and Western - in the Middle Ages.
Contents: Preface; Part 1 Hospitals and Institutions of Care: How medicalized were Byzantine hospitals?; The confraternities of Byzantium; Ritual and public health in the early medieval city; Religion as medicine: music in hospitals; A non-natural environment: medicine without doctors and the medieval European hospital; Family history and hospital history in the Middle Ages; A discipline of relevance: the historiography of the later medieval hospital. Part 2 Sickness and Healing: Pain in Hippocratic medicine; Travel sickness: medicine and mobility in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Renaissance; The death of ascetics: sickness and monasticism in the early Byzantine Middle East; Saints and doctors in the early Byzantine empire: the case of Theodore of Sykeon; Responses to possession and insanity in the earlier Byzantine world; Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages; Mediterranean plague in the age of Justinian; The Millennium bug: health and medicine around the year 1000; Continuity and discontinuity in the history of Mediterranean music therapy; Addenda; Index.
