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By chronicling the transformations of hospitals from houses of mercy to tools of confinement, from dwellings of rehabilitation to spaces for clinical teaching and research, from rooms for birthing and dying to institutions of science and technology, this book provides a historical approach to understanding of today's hospitals. The story is told in a dozen episodes which illustrate hospitals in particular times and places, covering important themes and developments in the history of medicine and therapeutics, from ancient Greece to the era of AIDS. This book furnishes a unique insight into the world of meanings and emotions associated with hospital life and patienthood by including narratives by both patients and care givers. By conceiving of hospitals as houses of order capable of taming the chaos associated with suffering, illness, and death, we can better understand the significance of their ritualized routines and rules. From their beginnings, hospitals were places of spiritual and physical recovery. They should continue to respond to all human needs. As traditional testimonials to human empathy and benevolence, hospitals must endure as spaces of healing.

This text, ostensibly the autobiography of Portugese explorer Fernão Mendes Pinto, came second only to Marco Polo's work in exciting Europe's imagination of the Orient. Chronicling adventures from Ethiopia to Japan, Travels covers twenty years of Mendes Pinto's odyssey as a soldier, a merchant, a diplomat, a slave, a pirate, and a missionary, and continues to overwhelm questions about its source with the sheer enjoyment of its narrative."[T]here is plenty here for the modern reader. . . . The vivid descriptions of swashbuckling military campaigns and exotic locations make this a great adventure story. . . . Mendes Pinto may have been a sensitive eyewitness, or a great liar, or a brilliant satirist, but he was certainly more than a simple storyteller."—Stuart Schwartz, The New York Times