The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (review)

The oldest hospital in England is St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield, London. Barts, as it is popularly known, began its life as a vision not of health care, but of spirituality. For the first 400 years of its existence, the health of the soul was at least as important as the health of the body to those who worked within the confines of the hospital priory. On the brink of the reformation, the hospital priory of Barts sustained no fewer than five chapels. Devotion and medicine went hand in hand. Nine hundred years later, this vision has metamorphosed into the modern medico-business that is the Barts and London NHS Trust, employing over 8,000 workers, with an annual budget of £480 million, and catering to the health needs of some half a million Londoners annually. Needless to say, the spiritual needs of this vast constituency have long since been turned over to other organizations.

These observations are prompted by John Henderson's magisterial study of renaissance health maintenance, which is his The Renaissance Hospital, sub-titled "healing the body and healing the soul." For the modern idea of the "hospital" as a place devoted primarily to physical health emerged from an earlier, more holistic idea of an individual's health needs. Central to Henderson's determinedly anti-Foucauldian thesis is the notion that the early-modern hospital was very different from the popular idea of such institutions as a grim hellhole of suffering, ignorance, and superstition; mortality rates are cited that suggest a surprising efficacy in the quality of care that was provided. Instead, Henderson's account of the renaissance hospital emphasizes the vital civic and religious elements of these institutions, an importance that was proclaimed in the physical fabric of the buildings erected to house the sick, the poor, and those dedicated to their care. Architecture, ornament, appearance (embraced in the Italian term bellazza) were at least as important to the founders and builders of the renaissance hospital as was the provision of health care to the sick or dying. The hospital thus conformed to those Renaissance notions of an ideal civic space in which beauty and proportion proclaimed a more general sense of the civic health of the society in which they were rooted. It is this emphasis on the architecture and appearance of the renaissance hospital, as well as the role it played in religious and civic ceremony, that will make this book an important port of call for cultural and social historians of the Renaissance, as well as those more directly concerned with the exploration of early-modern medicine.

The spiritual mission of the Renaissance hospital was founded upon the idea of Christus medicus—Christ the physician—whose task was to heal the wound caused in the primal act of transgression suffered in Eden. Hence, the drama of the passion, the wounding of Christ, and the restoration through suffering of humanity, was at the symbolic core of the Renaissance hospital. Around 1424, for example, the major hospital in Florence, S. Maria Nuova, commissioned a sculpture of the Man of Sorrows in the act that some cultural and art historians have termed "self-demonstration," and that came to inform many later images of the human body to be found in early-modern medical texts. In horrifying realism (which Henderson compares to the equally ghastly rendition of a suppurating Christ to be found in Matthias Grünewald's Eisenheim Alterpeice), Christ is shown pulling open the wound in his own side. This Florentine image is reminiscent of the painting by Caravaggio known as The Incredulity of St. Thomas, (c. 1603) where a group of apostles cluster around the resurrected Christ attentively watching as Thomas, like an unskilled physician, probes into the wound left by the Roman spear, attempting to satisfy himself of the truth of the resurrection. In Florence, the equivalent figure adorned the lunette above the door into the hospital...