[Hospitals in Europe and Yugoslavia through the centuries]

Abstract

The primary object of this paper is to give a retrospective of hospital development in Europe and Yugoslavia for the past twenty-five centuries. The earliest records of hospitals called the "iatreia" date back to the V century B.C., ancient Greece. The sick in those hospitals were treated with drugs as well operated on. The Romans, during the reign of the emperor Augustus, built valetudinaries within military camps. The name "hospital" was introduced in the IV century A.D. and has been used ever since. The first hospital was founded in Cesarea, i.e. in the East Roman Empire in Asia Minor. The chronology of the hospital development in the Middle Ages is given in table 1--"Chronology of Hospital Development in the Middle Ages." St. Sava (Nemanjić) founded the first Serbian hospital in the Monastery of Hilandar about 1199 and in 1208/1209 a hospital in the Monastery of Studenica. In the hospital of the Monastery of St. Arhangel in Prizren, according to the regulations prescribed by tzar Dusan, only curable patients were to be treated. The first hospital in Vojvodina in Bac near Novi Sad dates back to 1234. More data about hospitals in former Yugoslavia are given in table 2--"The Oldest Hospitals in former Yugoslavia" and about the Frontier Hospitals in Vojvodina in table 3--"Frontier Hospitals for the Wounded and Sick in Vojvodina". The first medical high school was established in Salerno in the IX century and the first European University in Bologna in 1088, where the School of Medicine was founded in 1156. The University in Paris was founded in 1107 and in Oxford in 1145.