From Asklepieia to Monasteries: the Places of Medical Art in Antiquity

Abstract

The Articles deals with the places of medical art in the antiquity. Author's intention is to give a description of the places where developed the assistance and welfare activity to sick people form the Asklepieia to Monastic Hospitals. In Theurgical Medicine the cure for sickness was peculiar to gods, at first to all gods, mostly to Apollo and Artemide; later healing art had an own god: Asclepius. In the temples of Asclepius, the Asklepieia, prayers, sacrifices, offerings and magical rituals began to be associated with medical practical exercise and rational therapeutic systems. Rational Hippocratic Medicine found own places in the cities: the iatreia in Greece and the tabernae in medicae in Rome. The Article try to describe the evolution of social welfare assistance from the Roman Valitudinaria to the monastic xenodochia and the first forms of Religious Hospitals.