ABSTRACT
The pocques and fystules healed at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London one hundred years after the fall of Constantinople almost certainly refl ect a part of the staple workload of medieval hospitals. We may picture, too, the seventeenthcentury Hôtel-Dieu in Paris receiving the poor and sick with these same affl ictions. Further back in time, and to the East, the large “hospital” at Caesarea in Cappadocia, St. Basil’s reputed foundation of the mid-fourth century, was said to be both poorhouse and resthouse, forerunner of the Byzantine xenônes of later centuries. But, is it possible to defi ne the true nature of a hospital from antiquity to the late medieval centuries? Some of the diffi culties lie in the protean nature of the meaning of “hospital”. As we have recalled, Michael Dols said that the medieval Byzantine and Islamic hospital was “a civilian charitable institution”, in the way of a “present day convalescent or nursing home”.
