Hospital Case Study

Hospitals played an important role in the development and continuation of humoral in the city. As a part of better understanding how this was able to occur, it is important to examine the function and development of hospitals as an institution. Hospital: an institution which provides the space, materials, constant care, and cures required to nurse sick people back to health under the supervision of professional physicians, and an admission policy serving the public. Under this definition, the first hospitals came into existence in the fourth century in Constantinople. Hospitals expanded their services from the sixth century onward becoming the principle theater of Byzantine medicine by the 12th century. The Christian church operated institutions

There is evidence that Justinian restructured the fourteen chief public physicians, so that they were employed in the Christian xenones. These physicians were called archiatroi, and were considered to be elite. These doctors were practitioners of humoral medicine, and had proven ability. This strengthened perceptions of hospitals, and made thrust them to the forefront of the field. This melding of Christian charitable hospitals to elite practitioners of humoral medicine was necessary for the creation of a unique brand of Byzantine humoral

In the founding documents, or typika, of hospitals give excellent detail on this hierarchy. Atop the physicians is the lecturer; the duties of this lecturer were to instruct the next generations of physicians in medicine. This made hospitals centers of learning for humoral medicine, and became a significant source of professional physicians. The lecturer trained physicians in much the same fashion that modern medical school train theirs: beginning with theory, followed by observation, and eventually easing them into practice. Today we call recent medical school grads interns, back in the Byzantine empire they were called perissoi- or ‘extras’. As their role as medical schools grew, xenones became important sources and depositories of medical treatises. Xenones would occasionally hire scribes to rebind or transcribe manuscripts: a prohibitively expensive process before the advent of the printing press. The fact that hospitals could afford to pay for this reveals them to be well funded, and therefore significant,