ABSTRACT
Now, if an English clergyman with such a reputation for miraculous powers were placed for some days in a London hospital, and in that time succeeded in quieting only one lunatic, his pretensions, to say the least, would be somewhat discredited. Juxtaposing sixth-century Rome and tenth-century Baghdad is not meant to imply some hitherto undetected cultural connection. It is simply an attempt to place Gregory’s anecdote on the larger historical map of institutionalized insanity. If the older historiography of lunatic asylums reached back before the French Revolution, it conventionally began with fifteenth-century Spain. Then, when more became known of the medieval Islamic bimaristan and its mad inmates, Spain became the conduit through which the idea of segregating the insane passed to Christendom. Pope Gregory prompts us also to reconsider the other end of the story: its apparent beginning in late antiquity, only two centuries after the Christian hospital was invented.
