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Hands down, I can tell you that’s a term you shouldn’t use. The linked post, which intersperses two short paragraphs with misleading quotes from other books…The second great sweep of medical history begins at the end of the fourth century, with the founding of the first Christian hospital at Caesarea in Cappadocia, and concludes at the end of the fourteenth century, with medicine well ensconced in the universities and in the public life of the emerging nations of Europe. (Albert Jonson. A Short History of Medical Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2000, 13.)“Rome only had military hospitals — known as the valetudinaria. The hospitals would be built in military camps, tending to soldiers who had been injured..”The general public was not serviced by hospital facilities until the empire had become Christian and charity for the sick and dying was considered part of the Christian’s duty. (Blackwell’s A Companion to the Roman Empire, pg. 505)“…the Christian extension of the hospital, previously only for soldiers in military camps and gladiators [was now] extended to the general public. Indeed, there was not a single civilian hospital in the entire history of Rome’s empire until the Christian era. By the 5th century, they may have even become ubiquitous in the Christian east (Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 314-315). Nowadays, at least here in Canada, there are quite a lot of hospitals…”…is precisely how you should *not* do history. It’s not how you ought to do religion either; it reminds me of similar efforts from other quarters (Forging Islamic Science – Nir Shafir | Aeon Essays). The effort to make religion relevant by cribbing off a little of science’s glory - “you owe us for that”, is what the writer seems to be saying - is tantamount to an admission that the actual religious paradigm is irrelevant, or at least one the speaker is embarassed to speak for in public. In this case, the argument is of an even lower sort - “non-Christians were more unkind than Christians, you need us to provide a moral foundation to society” - which is both wrong and insulting to others. It’s the excuse Victorian religion found to justify its existence after it became too abashed to speak of spirit to Science.But I digress. There is a grain of truth to the idea, but it’s far from what the line “Christian Hospital Revolution” implies to modern ears.Ancient Greek medicine (or Hippocratic medicine; doctors still swear the Hippocratic Oath, hinging on the doctrine of primum non nocere, “First [of all], Do No Harm”), generally considered the core of the rational therapeutic tradition still extant today, originated in the 4th c. BC. It coexisted, and often co-operated with, the hieratic tradition of the cult of Aclepius, god of medicine (“of all the gods the most philanthropos, the most loving to man”). The temples of Asclepius were really the first centres of mass public care for the sick, although not all of them were equally enmeshed in the Hippocratic medical tradition. Their main purpose was to offer a space for incubatory or mystical sleep, in which the god would appear in dreams and either heal or recommend treatments to patients; the priesthood, at least in the larger temples, seems to sometimes have been Hippocratic-medical professionals themselves. Hippocratic doctors practiced their trade for both the poor and the rich, but there was no notion of a secular house for the sick: they practiced their trade via home visits, and after e.g. disasters the wounded were taken (temporarily) to guest families’ homes to be treated by the itinerant doctors.The Latin-Roman medical tradition really began when the Roman clergy invited a “colony” of Greek healers-priests of Asclepius to found the Aesculapium in the vicinity of Rome. The cult of Asclepius was also the most durable of the old religions: long after the pagan Acropolis had been turned into a church, the curative Aclepieion in its shadow continued to receive supplicants. Some historians have argued that the later Christian philanthropic project was coterminous with the space of the old Greek world, already used to the function of Asclepian therapy. When the Christians finally closed down the Asclepian temples - as they did the Aesculapium in Rome - they often built their own hospital-monasteries on them.Your author is Greek, and can attest from personal familiarity that most churches in the old Greek world are literally layered on top of pagan temples. If you spot an old temple ruin, it’s already a given that you will look over the next hill to find the church, and vice versa: older churches are literally built from visible pieces of pagan temples, in one case incorporating a suspiciously functional-looking Mithraic altar (that was also a region where the practice of sacrificing bulls once a year has survived, 1,700 years later). This kind of continuity, rather than ambitious theories of ‘revolution’, seems far more natural to the reality of the place.^ The Asclepieion at Kos. Keeping with the theme of layered religious foundations, visible over the treeline is the minar-tip of the now defunct Gazi Hasan Pasha mosque, which is built partly from the remains of the Asclepian temple. Included in its garden is the sycamore tree under which Hippocrates - the ‘father of medicine’ - taught. The mosque was itself built on the foundations of an even older church, the basilica of St. George, which had once stood on the spot.Dozens of modern medical schools (including Yale University and the University of São Paulo) have trees on their grounds claimed to be cuttings of this original sycamore.Again, I digress. The early Christian institution that preceded the hospital is the xenodocheion. The word still exists in Greek, but it means ‘hotel’ or inn, not a place to cure the sick. These were the guest-houses of bishops, the heads of congregations, which gradually expanded from housing messengers and travellers to effectively becoming “homes for the poor”: early Christianity reached out to the lower classes, and formed a support network for the rejected urban lumpenproletariat of the Roman city. They were successful and important enough that when the pagan Emperor Julian tried to reform a version of paganism to compete with Christianity, his decrees included building a network of xenodocheion guest-houses in several cities.These early homes for the sick did not necessarily provide medical care: most would have been what is now called a hospice, where the sick and dying are housed in humane conditions. And the level of medical expertise in the West would not seriously exceed this level until the Renaissance. Monastic infirmaries would remain a common feature of Christian charity until today, but (as just criticism of their practices, such as e.g. that directed at Mother Theresa’s work in India) their relation to medical science was tentative, because medical science in the West was in crisis.So there is a reason why something much more like a modern hospital, in the sense that it not only housed but also healed the sick, was built in the Hellenistic East, in Asia Minor. And I quote:St. Basil of Caesarea (in Cappadocia) was a pioneer in establishing hospitalisation and care of the disabled and sick. In 369 he founded the celebrated Basilica at Caesarea, comprising a hospital which apparently had as many wards as there were diseases, and even included a section for lepers who had previously been kept in isolation and were now for the first time really cared for.The hospital also had extended quarters for medical staff, workshops, hospices for travellers and the poor, as well as an industrial school... At St. Basil’s insistence, hospitals were also built in neighbouring regions, and the Eastern Roman Empire often gave state assistance. At Edessa, for instance, a 300 bedded hospital was established by St. Ephraim in the aftermath of an epidemic in 375. In the following century a series of monastery-based hospitals, often with associated buildings for orphans and the poor, sprang up in many cities. In Rome the first hospital was founded in 390 by a Roman lady, Fabiola, a wealthy widow who sought absolution by spending her wealth on charitable works… (The Evolution of Hospitals from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Acta Theologica Supplementum 7)So in this new model, the hospital-poorhouse became part of the state infrastructure, a way for the Emperor (‘Basileus faithful in Christ’) to build a network of social support enmeshed with provincial and episcopal authorities. In the West, in the 9th century, Charlemagne (also crowned Roman Emperor) would make a more primitive copy by ordering infirmaries and poorhouses attached to all cathedrals (episcopal seats) in his dominions.^ 13th c. Greek medical tract, the Great Decameron, by Nicholas Myrepsos. It’s worth noting that this most notable and prolific of Eastern Christian doctors of his age (gaining the rank of actuarius at the Emperor’s court in Nicaea) was a native of Alexandria, a place of learning in Islamic rather than Christian lands.But while these anticipated the modern hospital, they lacked the teaching element. Medical knowledge in Europe stagnated, for a number of reasons, and the first entities that fulfilled all the functions of a modern hospital (housing, curing, and teaching) popped up in the Islamic world. Christianity developed a number of prejudices - among which was a dogmatic adherence to the medical theory of Galen, and a belief in the sanctity of the body that forbade exhumation and anatomy - effectively forcing Renaissance doctors to offend the Church if they were to continue research in the practical fashion of the ancient tradition. The Islamic world had no such prejudices, and it inherited the rich Hellenistic medical tradition of the Syriac Christians at Gundishapur (the main academy of the Persian empire, modern Iranian Khuzestan; it did not share Western Christian prejudices, but its lineal successor was Arabic Islam, not Latin Christianity). And it would be the voluminous writings of Persian and Arabic authors - in their Latin names, men such as Rhazes, Abulcasis, Avicenna, Avenzoar, and Averroes - that brought Europe not merely dogmatic adherence to Greek orthodoxy, but 1,000 further years of continuous research.Taking their example from the Christian (Nestorian) teaching hospital at Jundi-Shapur, Islam developed its own impressive hospitals (bimaristans) at Cordoba, Baghdad, Damascus, Bokhara, Sevilla and Cairo. A total of 34 major ones have been identified. Tudela, who visited Baghdad in 1160, wrote that there were 60 hospitals in that city and 50 in Cordoba. The greatest and most magnificent was the Mansuri hospital in Cairo (completed in 1284). This self-contained institution had four great courts, each with a water fountain in the centre, separate wards for men and women and for different diseases, a dispensary, lecture halls, and an out-patient department (from where patients were visited at their homes), a chapel and library. Fever wards were cooled by fountains. Musicians and storytellers entertained the sick, and on discharge each patient received a sum of money sufficient to pay for immediate expenses until he could resume work… Possibly the first mental hospital for the insane (a maristan) in Europe was built [in the remnant of Al-Andalus at] Granada in 1365.The hospitals at Cordoba, Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo in particular, also served as centres of medical education, attracting students from Europe and the Far East, spanning the void of Medieval scientific stagnation until the creation of Europe’s own fledgling medical schools at Salerno (11th century), followed by Montpellier and Bologna (13th century), Padua and Paris (14th century).Bimaristans, like the mosques, madrasas (legal schools), tombs and caravanserais they were often attached to, were ‘waqfs: charitable endowments held in public trust, sustained over centuries, often added to by successive generations of kings who wished to demonstrate their goodwill to the community. This provided the urban centres of the Islamic world with a sustainable network of public institutions, managed in tandem by the monarch (the nominal owner) under the oversight of the scholars and professionals running them.^ 14th c. maristan (asylum) of Arghun al-Kamil, in Aleppo.On a related tangent: the Black Death of the mid-14th century (which killed roughly half the population of Europe, and hit the more thickly urbanized Islamic world even harder) was in practice irremediable to any medical science of the time. And it was universally regarded as an act of God, and produced often surprising expressions of popular piety. In the Mamluk dominions in Syria, reactions ranged to e.g. this:During the greatest severity of the pandemic, orders were given in Cairo to assemble in the mosques and to recite the recommended prayers in common. Fasting and processions took place in the cities during the Black Death and later plague epidemics; the supplicatory processions followed the traditional form of prayer for rain. […]..a proclamation was made in Damascus inviting the population to fast … Most of the Damascenes were reported to have fasted, and several spent the night in the Umayyad Mosque performing the acts of faith as in the ritual during Ramadan ... On Friday morning the inhabitants of Damascus came out from all sides, including Jews, Chris­tians, Samaritans, old men and women, young infants, the poor, amirs, notables, and magistrates. Before the morning prayer, they marched from the Umayyad Mosque to the Mosque of the Foot and did not cease chanting the prayers throughout the day. (What was the non-Christian response to the Black Death?)In Europe, reactions became altogether darker: apart from socially subversive movements such as e.g. the self-flagellating dance macabre mass hysteria, it also engendered the greatest massacres of Jews (who were assumed responsible for the Plague) and other minorities until the Holocaust. Even strictly within the sphere of religious, rather than medical stewardship, Christianity has much to be humble about.Eastern medical knowledge, and this developed notion of the hospital, entered Europe through the boot of Italy - then one of the richest and most cosmopolitan parts of it - and the medical school of Salerno, notable for being the only one in Latin Christendom to train women as doctors. A figure closely tied with this process and the Renaissance was King Frederick II of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1198–1250).The multilingual (Greek- and Arabic-speaking) Emperor, himself culturally Sicilian rather than German, sought to restore Roman power in the Mediterranean. He has been described as:A man of extraordinary culture, energy, and ability – called by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi (the wonder of the world), by Nietzsche the first European, and by many historians the first modern ruler – Frederick established in Sicily and southern Italy something very much like a modern, centrally governed kingdom with an efficient bureaucracy (Detwiler, Donald S. (1999). Germany: A Short History)This kingdom of ‘The Two Sicilies’ [the Island and the Boot] - which, before becoming the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor, had been the last part of the West to remain tied to Constantinople - was instrumental in passing not only medical, but naval, philosophical and technical knowledge from the former Roman East to Europe; the Tabula Rogeriana made in 1154 by an Arab geographer in Latin for the king of Sicily was arguably the most detailed Western-language map to date.Long story short, the maintainance of a multicultural, partly Arabic-speaking court which patronized translations and imports of knowledge, and (worse) the Emperor’s attempts to curtail the Church’s status as a state-within-a-state, which kept all Italy and Germany pinned down in feudal particularism, earned Frederick the title Antichristus, excommunication, and his complete personal alienation from the Church. When real hospitals were established in northern Italy (such as in Milan), they consciously drew on Asclepian as well as Islamic architectural models; and these buildings, not some 5th c. monastic foundations, provided the material foundation for medical science into the industrial period. There is a reason why virtually every thinking intellectual in medieval Italy was an Emperor’s man or Ghibelline (Dante, for instance, is apart from his Divine Comedy the author of De Monarchia, a work castigating the Church’s secular interference and calling for the restoration of imperial rule).This was also the time when universities were established in the West, bringing the secular curriculum which had been taught in the East and the Islamic world to Latin audiences, beginning with Bologna in the 11th century.In sum: While late antique Christianity did bring visibility and some organisation to philanthropy for the poor, it was neither unprecedented nor a medical revolution. Those regions in which proto-hospitals emerged were those in which pagan medicine and sacred infirmaries would have been already in widest circulation.The effective predecessor to the modern hospital took its form in Islamic lands, and entered Christian Europe much later. And while it did grow to be encompassed by official ideas of charity and philanthropy, its source was visibly oriental, and the humanist school of thought behind it came to blows with religious authorities. To class this phenomenon, and the modern hospital after it, as originating with a “Christian revolution” in antiquity is not a reasonable interpretation.