ABSTRACT
The sombre assessment by the physician and surgeon Sir Thomas Browne (16051682) of the world that he inhabited is a melancholy simile. He spoke fi guratively and of his time. We may counter Thomas Browne’s refl ection on his mortality by an optimistic view of the fi rst recognisable hospitals by the Greek historian of medicine Georges C. Pournaropoulos (1909-1992). In the course of an address to the Seventeenth International Congress of the History of Medicine held in Athens and Cos in 1960, he said, “Byzantium’s philanthropic, social welfare and medical assistance institutions . . . were in every respect perfect and nearly similar to present day institutions of this kind. In any case they were the fi rst fully equipped European hospitals.” 1
More lasting, however, than the bricks and mortar of the Byzantine hospitals – xenônes – are their few surviving formularies (x enônos iatrosophia ) 2 in manuscripts recording remedies and ingredients. Setting aside modern conceptions of a hospital, we have to visualise what the leading historian of the Byzantine xenôn , Timothy Miller, has so painstakingly reconstructed from extant records and manuscripts. 3
The fi rst attempt to undertake a historical assessment of Byzantine hospitals took place in 1680 when the French Byzantinist Charles du Fresne, Sieur du Cange (1610-1688) reckoned that thirty-fi ve charitable institutions existed in Constantinople. 4 Present estimates number some 115 xenônes , xenodocheia and nosokomeia by the mid-ninth century in the city. 5 Throughout the time of the Byzantine Empire, not least in Egypt, xenônes were established, often small and local as befi tted local needs.
