Publisher's Synopsis
Hospitals were broadly conceived in the Middle Ages as establishments that received pilgrims and travelers, tended to the poor, and, with the professionalization of medicine, increasingly came to provide care for the sick and dying. In Charity and Welfare, James Brodman surveys the networks of hospitals and charitable institutions in medieval Catalonia that gave food to the hungry, dowries to indigent women, shelter to the homeless, and palliative care to the ill.