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Hospitals - housing the sick poor
During the 16th and 17th centuries, most of the wealthy sick were treated at home by the healer or healers of their choice. These might include apothecaries, herbalists, astrologers, empirics ('quacks' or charlatans), and wise-women as well as surgeons and physicians. Most university trained physicians were too expensive for the average purse. In European towns and cities of the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, town physicians employed by the municipal authorities treated the sick poor. The medieval concept of a hospital as a place of hospitality and healing for rich as well as poor changed during the 16th century. Hospitals became the province of the poor and were largely used as repositories for vagrants and beggars since there was a great fear that these offensive strangers would bring plague and other pestilence into a community.
In the early 16th century, the beadles of *St Bartholomew's Hospital, London (founded 1123), were ordered to scour the streets for vagrants lest they pollute the city. In 1552, the hospital claimed to have cured 800 sick poor during the previous 5 years 'of the pox, fistulas, filthy blanes and sores ... which might have stunk in the eyes and noses of the city'. In the rich cities of Italy, medical charity towards the sick poor was still valued, and her hospitals were among the finest in Europe. They included the famous Santa Maria Nuovo in Florence (founded in 1288) which had 170 beds by the beginning of the 16th century. Other Italian hospitals performed both hospitality and medical functions including feeding the poor and sick, taking in abandoned women and children, and offering alms to priests.
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