The Function of the Hospital as an Hospice in the Pre-modern Era

It is a widely held belief that "health care" is an old concept. As one of the most important institutions dealing with this issue, the hospital has been treating human beings throughout human civilization. But historical studies show that, in the pre-modern era, the hospital was not for the treatment of patients. Its function was as a nursing home for the poor and patients. In this article, we attempt to examine the reasons for this in two ways. We first examine the socioeconomic conditions that led to this function for hospitals in the middle ages. We then show that the treatment of patients at that time was based on humorism and classification medicine, which was not only considered the hospital as a place of treatment but also considered it as a barrier to treatment. Therefore, the hospital served as a hospice for the elderly and disabled, and veterans.