Abstract

Hospitals are traditional sites, not only of care, but of knowledge production. The word ‘hospital’ is derived from ‘hospitality’, and is also associated with ‘spital’, ‘hotel’ and ‘hospice’. In medieval society, the hospice was a place of rest, security and entertainment. The Knights Hospitallers were an order of military monks that took its historical origin from a hospital founded in Jerusalem in 1048. Before the rise of the modern research hospital, these spitals had a more general function as charitable institutions for the care and maintenance of the aged, infirm and impoverished. Hospitals were important in the historical emergence of the university, but with the dominance of bio-medical sciences medical faculties have become increasingly separated geographically and administratively from other faculties. Medical research is dominated by private corporations and increasingly medical knowledge exists outside the conventional procedures and norms of scientific research.