PEREGRINE HORDEN
Is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an
Extraordinary Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
His recent publications include Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages
(Ashgate, 2008), and (co-ed. with Elisabeth Hsu), The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in
Practice (Berghahan, 2013), and he is writing The First Hospitals, a world history of its
subject. He also studies environmental history, is co-author (with Nicholas Purcell), of The
Corrupting Sea (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), and is at work on its sequel, Liquid Continents. He
co-edited, with Sharon Kinoshita, A Companion to Mediterranean History (Wiley-Blackwell,
2014).
ABSTRACT | THE FIRST HOSPITALS – A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT?
Hospitals for the sick and needy that are recognizable forerunners of those
familiar from modern times did not begin in the 1790s as Foucault thought. They
began in the fourth century, the period known as Late Antiquity, around 1,400
years earlier. Charitable in intent – as were most European hospitals for
centuries to come – some of them had doctors in attendance. Others, lacking
doctors, none the less provided therapy: the therapy of religion, of an
appropriate interior space, of external amenities, of a beneficial soundscape. My
lecture will explore these various potential sources of healing – medicine without
doctors, as well as with them – and will ask what lessons or inspirations they
might offer to hospital designers now and in the future.