Category: Famous Hospitals
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…