The Architecture of Healing: Hospitals in the Mediterranean (600–1700)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the architectural history of hospitals in the premodern Mediterranean. Hospitals—institutions providing medical care and social services to the diverse populations across the region—maintained socially organized wards; operated facilities like pharmacies, soup kitchens, and baths; and trained staff to care for patients. Hospitals formed nodes in regional travel networks across West Asia, Anatolia, North Africa, and Southern Europe, regions between which premodern people traveled extensively. The past century has seen broad surveys of European hospitals and narrow studies of individual institutions; however, current scholarship lacks a synthesis of the disparate data on premodern hospitals across cultural contexts. The field is therefore left wanting for holistic conclusions about the relationship between architecture and healthcare in the premodern Mediterranean. Having compiled a database documenting the construction, patronage, and social histories of over 600 hospitals operating in the region, the dissertation develops a transcultural architectural history of the hospital that centers the built environment as a meaningful part of the human health experience. It contends that, as a result of significant premodern cross-cultural exchange, these hospitals constitute a group in their architectural forms, their support of advancements in medical care, and their facilitation of social bonds within communities. To determine the intellectual and practical trends in hospital construction, the project examines architectural remains and contemporaneous texts through the framing approaches of Global and Comparative History and Anti-Orientalism. Among the hospitals in the corpus are the Ospedale Maggiore (Milan), Hôtel-Dieu de Tonnerre (France), Divriği Hospital (Turkey), Bīmāristān of Nūr ad-Dīn (Damascus), Hospital de los Venerables (Seville), and the Bīmāristān al-Mu’ayyidi (Cairo). The textual evidence consists of architectural and medical treatises (Filarete, Ibn Sīnā), travel accounts (Ibn Jubayr, John of Würzburg), histories (Al–Maqrīzī), and hospital foundation charters. Throughout, the dissertation argues that hospitals were an architectural focal point of premodern communities across the Mediterranean, in which hospital builders developed similar architectural solutions to offer a range of social services to the sick and needy, while responding to regional cultural circumstances. From this vantage point, it develops a new foundation for the architectural history of premodern healthcare that brings to light the extent and shape of a transcultural phenomenon. It analyzes the historical data in the aggregate to address relationships between healthcare, spatial organization and ornament, and cross-cultural exchange in the diverse premodern Mediterranean. In a historiography that has minimized contributions of people in North Africa, West Asia, and Eastern Europe to the history of science and architecture, this project contributes to our knowledge of the formation of the modern age by questioning the Eurocentrism in narratives of scientific progress. Ultimately, it takes an interdisciplinary approach to consider how the diverse cultures of the Mediterranean participated in a shared architectural and scientific history. As such, the project serves as a robust scaffolding for the history of hospitals, science, and architecture.