Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages

Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

• Contents: Preface; Part 1 Hospitals and Institutions of Care: How medicalized were Byzantine hospitals?; The confraternities of Byzantium; Ritual and public health in the early medieval city; Religion as medicine: music in hospitals; A non-natural environment: medicine without doctors and the medieval European hospital; Family history and hospital history in the Middle Ages; A discipline of relevance: the historiography of the later medieval hospital. Part 2 Sickness and Healing: Pain in Hippocratic medicine; Travel sickness: medicine and mobility in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Renaissance; The death of ascetics: sickness and monasticism in the early Byzantine Middle East; Saints and doctors in the early Byzantine empire: the case of Theodore of Sykeon; Responses to possession and insanity in the earlier Byzantine world; Disease, dragons and saints: the management of epidemics in the Dark Ages; Mediterranean plague in the age of Justinian; The Millennium bug: health and medicine around the year 1000; Continuity and discontinuity in the history of Mediterranean music therapy; Addenda; Index.

'Students of medieval hospitals will rejoice at the publication of this collection, but all historians of ancient and medieval medicine will find here some food for thought. In particular, they will encounter methodological insights that offer an alternative to discourse studies and epistemological relativism' - Social History of Medicine.‘Historical studies on medieval medicine have undergone profound renewal in recent decades. The works of... Peregrine Horden are an outstanding example of this renewal as well as of the fruitfulness of the anthropological perspective in historical-medical studies of the pre-modern world... In sum, Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages constitutes a valuable addition to our knowledge of western medicine’ [translation from original Spanish] – Dynamis.'The Variorum Collected Studies Series has a long-standing tradition of presenting the best articles by individual established scholars in an easily accessible and useful format, and this volume continues that tradition. The sixteen essays collected in this book highlight the impressive breadth of Peregrine Horden’s interests and abilities. ... Peregrine Horden’s essays are insightful, valuable and a good read. Whether analysing a historiographic tradition (essay VII) or addressing a specific historical theme, the articles in this volume point us in new directions that will benefit scholars in fields as varied as the history of medicine, ecology, spirituality and medieval culture' - Medical History.'Ein Werk, das in der entsprechenden Abteilung einer medizinhistorischen Bibliothek nicht fehlen sollte' - Sudhoffs Archiv.