Angelus News | July 19-26, 2019 | Vol. 4 No. 26

Christianity’s healthiest idea
The untold story of how
the Church invented
the hospital — and
redefined health
care in the process
BY MIKE AQUILINA / ANGELUS
SHUTTERSTOCK
The hospital arose as a Christian
institution utterly dependent
upon Christian principles.
The foremost expert on the early history
of hospitals, Gary Ferngren, Ph.D.,
made the point most emphatically in
his recent historical survey published
by Johns Hopkins University. He wrote:
“The hospital was, in origin and conception,
a distinctively Christian institution,
rooted in Christian concepts of
charity and philanthropy. There were
no pre-Christian institutions in the
ancient world that served the purpose
that Christian hospitals were created
to serve. … None of the provisions for
health care in classical times … resembled
hospitals as they developed in the
late fourth century.”
It’s not that there was no one practicing
medicine. What passed for
the medical profession was a riot of
different types of practitioner. Many
took up some strain of the Hippocratic
tradition, but others were herbalists,
soothsayers, magicians, or folk healers.
There was no board to certify anyone.
There were no medical schools to
grant diplomas. Most professional healers
simply underwent an apprenticeship
with someone more experienced.
Many practitioners made their living
by wandering from town to town, perhaps
outrunning the public response to
their latest failures. Some made their
way across continents this way.
From the wisecracks we find in the
Bible and other ancient literature, it
seems that sick people understood
that it was a risky proposition to seek
healing. Medicine in the first centuries
A.D. was an uncertain and unstable
business.
Why? Well, the wandering “medici”
(“doctors”) had no roots, no local loyalties,
no lasting accountability. They
had no institutional form because there
was no institutional form available to
them.
The Greeks and Romans had temples
of Asclepius, where sick people went
to pray and offer sacrifice in hope of
a cure. Treatment in such places was
usually based on the interpretation of
dreams dreamt by the sick during a
time of incubation in the sanctuary.
While the Asclepian temples may
have provided some occasional relief,
they were not hospitals. They kept no
long-term patients. They offered no
extended program of treatment on site.
The nearest approximation of a
hospital in classical antiquity was the
“valetudinarium” (“hospital”), which
was essentially a repair shop for soldiers
or slaves.
Both soldiers and slaves represented
huge investments for their overseers.
Their value was expected to last years
and even decades. And so the ancients
established places where their human
property could be restored to productivity.
As far as we know, the Romans never
entertained the idea of providing “valetudinaria”
for the wider population.
It’s difficult to see how they could have
made one profitable or even sustainable.
And yet there was great demand
for medical care. Pain, sickness, and
10 • ANGELUS • July 19-26, 2019