Patterns of Hospitality: Aspects of Institutionalisation in 15th & 16th Centuries Nuremberg Healthcare

The paper deals with poor relief and health care provision by hospitals and hospital-like institutions in the imperial city of Nuremberg in 15th and 16th centuries southern Germany. It concentrates on the interplay and the functional connections of different types of charity. Thus, it is hoped to gain a more reliable base for analysing processes of differentiation in early modern health care provision than looking for the developments only in one prominent hospital alone. Special attention is paid to a charity caring for foreign lepers and thus prima facie contradicting the general trend of excluding lepers as well as foreigners from benevolence within the city's walls. In addition to analyse the hospitals' regulations and the patients' motiviation to get into a hospital this paper suggests to take a look for the ecomical and administrative conditions which force the inmates to leave hospitals and thus accelerating the development of temporarily care.