page_title: Catholic Church and health care
section_title: Antiquity
hierarchical_section_title: Catholic Church and health care / History / Antiquity
caption_attribution_description: English: Panorama of the Hospital Santa Maria della Scala seen from the backside (Via del Chiasso di Sant’Ansano / Due Porte), Siena, Tuscany, Itay
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: Ancient Greek and Roman medicine developed solid foundations over seven centuries, creating, Porter wrote, "the ideal of a union of science, philosophy and practical medicine in the learned physician...". But Greek and Roman religion did not preach of a duty to tend to the sick. Christianity  emerged into this world as a Jewish sect in the mid-1st century and early Christians from the outset went about tending the sick and infirm. Their priests were often also physicians. St Luke the Evangelist, credited as one of the authors of The New Testament, was a physician. Christian emphasis on practical charity was to give rise to the development of systematic nursing and hospitals after the end of the persecution of the early church.
  The early Christian outlook on sickness drew on various traditions, including Eastern asceticism and Jewish healing traditions, while the New Testament wrote of Jesus and his Apostles as healers. Porter wrote: "While suffering and disease could appear as chastisement of the wicked or a trial of those the Lord loved, the Church also developed a healing mission". Pagan religions seldom offered help to the sick, but the early Christians were willing to nurse the sick and take food to them. Notably during the smallpox epidemic of AD 165–180 and the measles outbreak of around AD 250, "In nursing the sick and dying, regardless of religion, the Christians won friends and sympathisers", wrote historian Geoffrey Blainey.
  Hospitality was considered an obligation of Christian charity and bishops' houses and the valetudinaria of wealthier Christians were used to tend the sick. Deacons were assigned the task of distributing alms, and in Rome by 250 AD the Church had developed an extensive charitable outreach, with wealthy converts supporting the poor. It is believed that the first church hospitals were constructed in the East, and only later in the Latin West. An early hospital may have been built at Constantinople during the age of Constantine by St. Zoticus. St. Basil built a famous hospital at Cæsarea in Cappadocia which "had the dimensions of a city".  In the West, Saint Fabiola founded a hospital at Rome around 400. Saint Jerome wrote that Fabiola founded a hospital and "assembled all the sick from the streets and highways" and "personally tended the unhappy and impoverished victims of hunger and disease... washed the pus from sores that others could not even behold"
  Several early Christian healers are honoured as Saints in the Catholic tradition. Cosmas and Damian, brothers from Cilicia in Asia Minor, supplanted the pagan Asclepius as the patron saints of medicine and were celebrated for their healing powers.." Said to have lived in the late Third Century AD and to have performed a miraculous first leg transplant on a patient, and later martyred under the Emperor Diocletian, Cosmos and Damian appear in the heraldry of barber-surgeon companies.." Notable contributors to the medical sciences of those early centuries include Tertullian (born A.D. 160), Clement of Alexandria, Lactantius and the learned St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636). St. Benedict of Nursia (480) emphasised medicine as an aid to the provision of hospitality. The martyr Saint Pantaleon was said to be physician to the Emperor Galerius, who sentenced him to death for his Christianity. Since the Middle Ages, Pantaleon has been considered a patron saint of physicians and midwives.
  The administration of the Eastern and Western Roman Empires split and the demise of the Western Empire by the sixth century was accompanied by a series of violent invasions, and precipitated the collapse of cities and civic institutions of learning, along with their links to the learning of classical Greece and Rome. For the next thousand years, medical knowledge would change very little.." A scholarly medical tradition maintained itself in the more stable East, but in the West, scholarship virtually disappeared outside of the Church, where monks were aware of a dwindling range of medical texts.." The legacy of this early period was, in the words of Porter, that "Christi
caption: Panorama of Siena's Santa Maria della Scala Hospital, one of Europe's oldest hospitals.
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