Patterns of Hospitality: Aspects of Institutionalisation in 15th & 16th Centuries Nuremberg Healthcare

Abstract

eginning in the late 14 and accelerating in the mid-15 century, health care relief underwent far-reaching changes in German imperial cities. 1 With regard to the organisational framework of relief they have been analysed and described as processes of institutionalisation, hospitalisation, specialisation, and communalisation. With respect to the healing personnel in charge of applying health care relief schemes initiated by the city councils and hospital administrations, this development has been characterised as professionalisation. Altogether, these transformations could be looked at as a premodern stage of “medicalisation”. But of course, one risks anachronism when applying this term to earlier developments. 3 B