Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Category: Famous Hospitals

  • Dipinto di blu: Turning blue in a Florence hospital

    Giulio Nicita Florence, Italy   A view of Villa Monna Tessa. From the author’s archive. We were in the middle of the 1970s in Florence, Italy. We had concluded the long, tedious years of university study. Real work awaited us in Villa Monna Tessa, a large early 1900s four-story building. It housed several departments of…

  • What’s in a name?

    Aaroh Dubey London, England   St. Bart’s quadrangle fountain. Photo by author. “What’s in a name?” Juliet asks the audience in Act 2 Scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet. The play laments the folly of holding onto the past and giving undue meaning to names and titles.1 Outside of Shakespeare, however, things are rarely as…

  • The origins of the word “hospital”

    Simon WeinPetach Tikvah, Israel According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “hospital” is derived from the Old French “ospital,” meaning hostel, shelter, lodging, or shelter for the needy. The origin can be traced to the Latin “hospitale” and persists in the modern French “hôpital.” The OED states further: The sense of “charitable institution to…

  • St. Fabiola and her hospital

    In about AD 380, a wealthy patrician matron gave money for a hospital to be built in Portus, the ancient port of Rome. This hospital was one of the first of its kind in the western part of the Roman empire, designed to provide care for the multitude of poor people living in the capital.…

  • Great Ormond Street and JM Barrie

    Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden   Cover of Peter Pan and Wendy by JM Barrie, 1915. Colorized by Binaire on Wikimedia. Bloomsbury: Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Crop of photo by Nigel Cox on geograph.org.uk via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 2.0. James Matthew Barrie (1860–1937) was a Scottish novelist and playwright. He wrote about thirty novels…

  • Long before Pearl Harbor, an entire hospital was sent to help England in World War II

    Edward Tabor Bethesda, MD, United States   An Allied convoy underway in the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland. Photo c. 1942. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia. Public domain. Harvard University President James B. Conant had the idea of sending a fully staffed hospital to England to help the British in their war with Germany…

  • Las Animas: A Cuban yellow fever hospital

    Enrique Chaves-Carballo Kansas City, Kansas, United States David Schwartz Atlanta, Georgia, United States   Fig. 1. Ward 1 of Las Animas Hospital for yellow fever patients. First published in 1904 by Enrique Barnet in his monograph on Las Animas Hospital.3 Public domain. John Hay, U.S. Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt, described the Spanish-American War…

  • Guadalupe: One of Spain’s oldest schools of medicine

    Nicolás Roberto Robles Badajoz, Spain   Figure 1. The Monastery of Guadalupe. Main entrance. Photo by Rafa G. Recuero. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 ES. Guadalupe, a small Spanish town in the district of Cáceres, Extremadura, arose around a monastery. Legend says that a shepherd named Gil Cordero was looking for a stray sheep when…

  • St. Godric and the lost leper hospital of Darlington

    Stephen Martin UK   Fig 1. Godric praying to the Virgin, c 1400. PD-US, accessed: wikimedia, original: ©British Library Board, Cotton, Faustina, VI, ii 16 V. In the late 1100s, the English monk Reginald of Durham wrote an account in Latin of the hermit St. Godric, whom he knew personally.1 Reginald attributed over two hundred…

  • The monastic infirmaries of North Yorkshire

    Stephen Martin UK   Fig 1. Well-preserved walls of Rievaulx Abbey, 1225-40. Photo © author, 2021, permission for non-commercial and academic reuse.     Fig 2. Rievaulx, decorated gothic chancel of the Abbey Church, c. 1240, looking west, avant-garde architecture for its time. Photo © author, 2021, permission for non-commercial and academic reuse.   North…