Where did hospitals and universities come from?

01The reason

Why Christians cared

“Naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me.”

The Catechism says Christ’s love for the sick has not ceased through the centuries to draw the very special attention of Christians toward all those who suffer.⁵

“And the king answering shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.”

Basil took that literally, and built it in stone.

02Around the year 370

Basil’s “new city”

Britannica records that about 370 St Basil the Great established a foundation in Cappadocia “that included a hospital, an isolation unit for those suffering from leprosy, and buildings to house the poor, the elderly, and the sick.”¹

Following this example, similar hospitals were later built in the eastern part of the Roman Empire.¹

“Go forth a little way from the city, and behold the new city, the storehouse of piety, the common treasury of the wealthy.”

In the West, the same care often lived behind monastery walls.

03The monasteries

Monasteries

Britannica notes that monasteries often housed infirmaries and provided medical care.¹

And the monks and clergy were not only caring for bodies. They were teaching.

04The 11th to 13th centuries

The first universities

According to Britannica, the earliest studia “arose out of efforts to educate clerks and monks beyond the level of the cathedral and monastic schools.”²

Bologna was founded late in the 11th century and Paris between 1150 and 1170, and the University of Toulouse, founded by Pope Gregory IX in 1229, was the first established by papal decree.²

A hospital outside a city in Cappadocia, a lecture hall in Bologna. Both grew up in the life of the Church, and both are still with us.