HOSPITALS (Hospitium, Hospitale). - This name is given to those special charitable institutions destined for the care and shelter of the sick and of those unfit for work, provided with special buildings and revenues for the purpose, when they are not subsidized by private charity. As charitable institutions they are today for the most part erected into moral bodies with their own patrimony and assisted by the public authorities (v. CHARITY, II. History of ch.).
Some examples of them are found in classical antiquity; but they had their true origin and development from the exercise of Christian charity, spurred by the needs that arose especially in troubled times, when the relief of poverty was not sufficiently met by the provisions of public charity and social conditions were therefore in profound decline. They could be organized in a stable manner only once the Church had obtained recognition of her freedom. In Byzantine antiquity they are designated by the name of "nosocomium" if destined for the sick, of "xenodochium" if they served for strangers, of "ptochium" for the poor, of "gerontocomium" for the old, of "brephotrophium", of "orphanotrophium".
For the East there is remembered the hospital erected by St. Basil near Caesarea of Cappadocia, of which St. Gregory of Nazianzus speaks (Orat., XX, 91), and at Rome the one erected by the matron Fabiola (v.) and the other erected by the patrician Pammachius at the mouth of the Tiber, of which St. Jerome speaks (Ep. LXXVII ad Oceanum); followed by other foundations remembered by St. Gregory the Great and by the biographers of the Liber Pontificalis. Similar institutions existed also in other dioceses of Italy, whether under the protection of the bishops or alongside the monasteries; indeed monastic houses were founded with the express purpose of providing shelter for the sick and safety for pilgrims, especially along the great arteries of communication in the most inconvenient and perilous culous. When special epidemics later spread through the West, especially beginning in the 11th century, special hospitals also arose, governed by nurses living in community such as the Antonians at Vienne (Provence), or, to check the advance of leprosy, special leprosaria (v.) or lazarettos (v.). With the progress of the communal regime and the organization of industries, it was the individual guilds that provided for the hospitalization of their sick and the shelter of those among them unable to work; it was the confraternities that similarly provided for their members; and in particular it was the societies of the Battuti that promoted the erection of new and larger hospitals. One must not imagine for those times (13th century and following) institutions as organized and complex as those of the modern age: yet medical assistance and care were not lacking, entrusted either to special nursing personnel or to pious persons, particularly women. In the cities most frequented for commerce or transit, hospitals were founded for the needy or for pilgrims of individual nations, as happened in Rome in imitation of what had already been done in the early Middle Ages; likewise at obligatory points of passage, on rivers or mountains, special hospitaller orders held the governance of the hospitals. With the Renaissance, especially in Italy, a further progress is noted: in the larger cities above all, many small hospitals were concentrated into one, giving rise to more hygienic and grander buildings (even to the point of monumentality), with more suitable regulations and richer endowments; suffice it to recall, besides those of Rome, those of Genoa, Milan, Venice, Florence, Siena. The leprosaria, having become almost useless, were in many places replaced by hospitals for incurables and by lazarettos in times of epidemics. The hospital regime then went on improving in the following age; the ancient hospitaller orders, which, in their decline, had transformed their institutions into commendams to the advantage far more of individual commendatories than of the poor, were succeeded, at least in many places, by special religious congregations (Fatebenefratelli, Camillians); gradually from the 17th century onward women too, organized in a manner suited to the needs, began to devote themselves to the care of the inmates, until they too formed special congregations which took as their sole purpose nursing care or combined it with the exercise of other religious activities.
In our own day hospitals are more properly nosocomia, sometimes limited to the treatment only of certain diseases or special classes of patients (children's hospitals). The assistance of other classes of the needy, which during the Middle Ages had poured into the hospitals, is today assigned to special institutions for providing for infants, the elderly, orphans, and the chronically ill. On the other hand, nursing homes and clinics, which no longer assume the character of charity, cannot be counted among hospitals properly so called.
Bibliography11 works
Pio Paschini