page_title: Catholic Church and health care
section_title: Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Catholic Church and health care / History / Renaissance
caption_attribution_description: English: Scan of frontispiece from the book "Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence." Scanned images for entire book available at https://archive.org/details/mendelsprinciple1902bate
context_page_description: The Roman Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of health care services in the world. It has around 18,000 clinics, 16,000 homes for the elderly and those with special needs, and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent of them located in developing countries. In 2010, the Church's Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Health Care Workers said that the Church manages 26% of the world's health care facilities. The Church's involvement in health care has ancient origins.
  Jesus Christ, whom the Church holds as its founder, instructed his followers to heal the sick. The early Christians were noted for tending the sick and infirm, and Christian emphasis on practical charity gave rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals. The influential Benedictine rule holds that "the care of the sick is to be placed above and before every other duty, as if indeed Christ were being directly served by waiting on them". During the Middle Ages, monasteries and convents were the key medical centres of Europe and the Church developed an early version of a welfare state.
context_section_description: From the 14th Century, the European Renaissance saw a revival of interest in Classical learning in Western Europe, coupled with and fuelled by the spread of new inventions like the printing press. The Fall of Constantinople brought refugee scholars from the Greek East to the West. The Catholic scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was interested in medicine and influential in reviving Greek as a language of learning, and the study of the pre-Christian works of Galen. Roy Porter wrote that "after centuries where the Church had taught mankind to renounce worldly goods, for the sake of eternity, Renaissance man showed an insatiable curiosity for the materiality of the here and now...".
  In Renaissance Italy, the Popes were often patrons of the study of anatomy and Catholic artists such as Michelangelo advanced knowledge of the field through such studies as sketching cadavers to improve his portraits of the crucifixion. It is often wrongly asserted that the papacy banned dissection during the period, though in fact the directive of Pope Sixtus IV of 1482 to the University of Tübingen said that the Church had no objection to anatomy studies, provided the bodies belonged to an executed criminal, and was given a religious burial once examinations were completed.
caption: Gregor Mendel, Augustinian Friar and scientist, who developed theories on genetics for the first time.
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