The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul

Abstract

The oldest hospital in England is St. Bartholomew's in Smithfield, London. Barts, as it is popularly known, began its life as a vision not of health care, but of spirituality. For the first 400 years of its existence, the health of the soul was at least as important as the health of the body to those who worked within the confines of the hospital priory. On the brink of the reformation, the hospital priory of Barts sustained no fewer than five chapels. Devotion and medicine went hand in hand. Nine hundred years later, this vision has metamorphosed into the modern medico-business that is the Barts and London NHS Trust, employing over 8,000 workers, with an annual budget of £480 million, and catering to the health needs of some half a million Londoners annually. Needless to say, the spiritual needs of this vast constituency have long since been turned over to other organizations.

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