This chapter looks at Ivan Illich’s specific work on the history of hospitality. Illich proposes that the word is hospitality. People lived in a world in which there were no institutions of hospitality but also in which they claimed no universal relationship with each other. One can see the isolated person with mental retardation, abandoned in the depths of the most horrible state institution, as a perversion of the Christian idea of the brotherhood of man, of the concept of hospitality somehow gone terribly wrong. Yet the personal offering of hospitality was central to the Christian message. The action of hospitality, however, is only one, albeit an important, aspect of informal or vernacular life transformed through the application of a systemic view. Hospitality is considered a minor, if pleasant, social convention. Ancient traditions of hospitality guide the outcome.