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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74.4 (2000) 817-818



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Book Review

Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals


Guenter B. Risse. Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xx + 716 pp. Ill. $39.95.

Mending Bodies is a loosely connected series of histories of some nineteen individual hospitals, or types of healing places, that existed at various times from the ancient Greek and Roman periods up to the present. Insofar as documentation permits, Professor Risse follows one particular patient at each of the selected hospitals through the progress of his or her illness and treatment. Then, building on and around the experience of these patients, he examines in depth a broad range of factors pertaining to the existence and functioning of the selected hospitals and their relationships to larger communities. He thus considers such matters as the social and economic settings; the governmental, religious, or other sponsorships; the status of medical knowledge; the nature of diagnostic and therapeutic practices; and the features of organization, management, and staffs. Risse has been highly successful in dealing with this complex subject. His text brings together a treasure trove of fascinating material, skillfully organized, and frequently poignant in its impact. It is also impressively erudite, perceptive, and buttressed by numerous footnotes.

The first third of the book is particularly rewarding for readers who are not specialists in antiquity or the middle ages. Specifically, it brings to life, and places in their relevant settings, numerous medical personalities who are known to many of us only by name, if at all. In fact, Risse's wide-ranging treatments of those early eras include as much of the general history of medicine as of the history of hospitals. He is especially effective in his tracing of the rise and long dominance of the Christian tradition of caring for the old and sick, both in and out of hospitals.

The larger portion of the book traces the gradual erosion of the caring tradition in the hospitals, and its replacement, during the past two to three centuries, by mainline "scientific" medicine. Risse treats this period with a competence based on his own previous historical studies. And, for the late-twentieth-century American hospital, he brings a particular interest founded on his hospital experiences as a physician-historian. In fact, he shapes the conclusion of his volume into a brief critique of our present-day hospitals, institutions that he rightly feels have become overly technological and scientifically based, overly dominated by business imperatives, and too often lacking in the human or spiritual warmth that was found in some earlier periods of Western hospital medicine.

There are relatively few matters to complain about in this volume. I do feel that some portions of the text are overburdened with detailed examinations of medical ideas and technical practices, while the introductory sections include an unnecessarily long academic discussion of historical methodology and structure. Moreover, I found the index awkward and not very thorough in coverage. Finally, the subtitle of the book, "A History of Hospitals," taken by itself, unfortunately [End Page 817] invites some misunderstanding as to the scope: the potential reader should understand ahead of time that the work is not intended to be a comprehensive history of hospitals, but a highly selective one.

Risse advises us that he has deferred consideration of hospital architecture to a future volume, that he has deliberately confined the present work to the hospital history of the Western world, and that many of his other omissions were results of his own cultural or professional preferences, of organizational requirements, or of a lack of time or material. Given his massive topic and special interests, I believe that his selectivity was wise historiographic strategy. By exercising it intelligently, he has given us a brilliant treatment of those portions of hospital history that he has chosen to study.



James H. Cassedy
National Library of Medicine

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