The Invention of a Medical Institution? A Discussion of Hospitals Around 1800

iscussing health care between self-help, intermediary organisations and formal poor relief in terms of choices between the informal and the formal it seems quite clear on which side research of hospitals in the late 18th century is placed. Based on the formula of the “Birth of the Clinic ” and relying on sociological research of hospitals of the late 1960s and 1970s wide parts of the Ger-man-speaking social history of medicine dedicated to the 19th and early 20th century development of the modern hospital claimed their historical subject to be “one of the most complex institutions of man.”1 This research abandoned the suggestion of a long-term transition from the medieval hospital to the late 20th century high-tech-clinic in which religion has been slowly disappearing from hospitals while clinical observation and permanently growing knowledge of nature of disease and finally scientific medicine captured the charitable home of benevolence.2 This research had to suggest a systematic rupture around 1800.3 Two reasons were named for that. Firstly, in a systematic sense, the main objective of medieval and early modern hos-pitals was not the physical cure of sick patients (i.e. the restoration of their ability t