Medical historians have traditionally claimed that modern hospitals emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Premodern hospitals, according to many scholars, existed mainly as refuges for the desperately poor and sick, providing patients with little or no medical care. Challenging this view in a compelling survey of hospitals in the East Roman Empire, Timothy Miller traces the birth and development of Byzantine xenones, or hospitals, from their emergence in the fourth century to their decline in the fifteenth century, just prior to the Turkish conquest of...
Medical historians have traditionally claimed that modern hospitals emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Premodern hospitals, ...
Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective psyche of Western society, thanks to a frightening epidemic that ravaged Catholic Europe. The Church responded by constructing charitable institutions called leprosariums to treat the rapidly expanding number of victims. As important as these events were, Timothy Miller and John Nesbitt remind us that the history of leprosy in the West is incomplete without also considering the Byzantine Empire, which confronted leprosy and its effects well...
Leprosy has afflicted humans for thousands of years. It wasn't until the twelfth century, however, that the dreaded disease entered the collective ...
