Little is known of the specific activities of the physicians at the Hospital of Santo Spirito. The administration of the Hospital was left in the hands of the Hospital Order of Santo Spirito and overseen by a man appointed by the pope for his administrative and religious capacities, not his medical knowledge. There are records of inspections of the dispensary, lists of the contents and costs of various ingredients for medicines and more general discussions of diet and cleanliness, but nothing has come to light that pertains to specific cases, treatments, or patient experiences. This chapter outlines some of the concepts about health and the body that would have been shared by physicians, priests and musicians alike, and that are foundational to the investigations and analyses that follow.

During the period under consideration, there were four physicians employed in the hospital at any one time. These men were university-educated and there-fore had a background in logic and natural philosophy as well as the medical theories of Hippocrates, Galen and Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. They worked alongside a team of barber-surgeons, lithotomists and apothecar-ies – occupations that were less strictly licensed. The nursing was done by friars of the Order and lay members of the Confraternity. While many eminent phy-sicians were employed at the hospital, it must be remembered that treatment of the soul of the patient was a fundamental part of the regime of cure of the sick. Doctors worked alongside priests and chaplains and were expected to be good Christians. Whatever the scientific view of illness, and in the seventeenth century scientific views were shifting rapidly with each new discovery, prayer for the sick remained of fundamental importance, along with confession and the sacraments. This close relationship between religion and medicine became increasingly complex with growing anatomical knowledge and the shifting paradigms of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’. Some of these complexities are illustrated by the processes for the beatification and canonisation of saints during which physicians were called upon to make judgements about apparent miracle cures.

While we have little or no evidence of the physicians’ specific work in the hospital, many of the men employed there also held other positions: teach-ing at the university; as personal physicians to members of the aristocracy and high-ranking prelates; and in private medical practice.