Katerina Konstantinidou, For soldiers, paupers and innocent infants... Hospital Care in Venetian Corfu (17^th-18^th c.), Eurasia Publications, Athens 2012.

The institutions of hospital care, as they take shape, operate and develop during the early modern period constitute a prominent research field and have been evolving for several decades into an ideal field of interdisciplinary approaches. Areas of traditional charity in certain cases, systematic medical care in others, or a combination of the above two sides most of the times, hospital institutions constituted complex cultural “structures”, products of the particular economic, social, politic co-ordinates of the period of their foundation and the environment of their accommodation. Within this context, their multiple roles render difficult and at times unfortunate the inflexible application of fixed theoretical forms: the everyday practice and the timelessness of the institutions, not rarely, surpass them, undermining their basic principles and consequently their credibility. Of course, it is all too clear that this does not imply the positivistic interpretative approach to the material under examination. Simply, it requires greater attention against the “inflexibility” of the interpretative schemes.

The history of hospitals in venetian Corfu during the 17th and 18th c. constitutes a particular case of the broader European history of hospital institutions, while its examination is revealing of the way the dynamics and the demands of the period were perceived by a peripheral European society; a society, dynamic, conflictual in certain cases, dominated by institutionalized strata and informal internal hierarchies, under venetian rule which orientated the social and political developments towards specific directions, imposing, at the same time the economic and military priorities of Venice itself. The above mentioned aspects constituted the basic axes around which the research moved as well as the interpretation of the foundation of hospitals on the venetian ruled Ionian Islands of their administration and finally of their relations with the social subjects and the space. The hospitals for the oarsmen of the Armada (Ospedale dei Condannati) and the hospitals for the soldiers (Ospedale Militare) in the city of Corfu, are recognized as part of the venetian military organization in the Levant, with the aim on the one hand the preservation of its territories in the area and on the other its expansion into the greek territories and the Dalmatian coast around the end of the 17th and even in the beginning of the 18th c. Th e exclusive responsibility of Venetian government for their operation, the manning of their administration initially, mainly with military offi cers and the exclusion of the local society from their organization defined their distinct physiognomy while, at the same time, ensured the continuation of their course through time. Since the time of the fourth Venetian-Ottoman conflict (1570-1573) when the Ospedale dei Condannati was organized and later, in the beginning and middle, approximately, of the 17th c. when two more hospitals for the soldiers opened their gates, these institutions constituted areas of medical care of hundreds or even thousands of cases every year. Emphasis in their medical dimension is given by the appointment, in 1739, for the position of administrative head, of a surgeon. Even more, the reform of the one military hospital a litt le before the end of the venetian dominion with the involvement of the medical order of San Giovanni di Dio, conformed its services provided according to the standard of its respective contemporary European institutions, signaling the course towards its clinicalization. Nevertheless, the scientific dimension of its operation and the medical care of the body never took place at the expense of the healing of the soul of its patients. Inside this hospital, in several cases, the need of medical care was employed by the ecclesiastical mechanism, with the consent, the encouragement and the institutional consolidation of the secular authorities as a vehicle of proselytism of the inmates to catholicism within the area of the hospital.

A totally diff erent dimension of hospital care was the Ospedela della Pieta, which offered shelter to the abandoned children of the island Its foundation in the beginning of the 1670 decade could be associated with the trauma of the loss of Crete to the Ottomans (1669) and the need for collective atonement of the Christian community of the island for the crime of infanticide. However, independently of the psychological dimensions that could be detected at the beginning of if its foundation ,its aim was on the one hand the control of a potentially dangerous category of the population and on the other its future incorporation into the production process. Its foundation request presented by the civic Urban Council of the city in 1666, was an expression of a strong civic identity of a powerful local social group, that of the cittadini. However, serious problems in the running of the hospital during the first years of its operation caused the intervention of the venetian administrators of Corfu who were critical towards the representatives of the local power. The continuous claim of the venetian administrators of the periphery to acquire more power from the venetian government is the one side of the coin Th e other side expresses the desire of a local elite to follow the paths of the venetian institutional tradition as well as the tradition of the other urban centers of the venetian periphery. Th is dimension was obvious from the quality of the services off ered within it: shortly before the end of the 17th c., according to the reports and the denouncement of venetian officials, none of the foundlings had managed to survive within the environment of the foundling hospital.

The foundation of the hospital of the Sick Poor and the assignment of its administration a litt le later to the catholic fraternity of the Madonna del Santissimo Rosario is due to the wealthy catholic merchant, Zuanne Dilotti.. First of all, his beneficence is interpreted as an expression of religious sentiment in the margins of the moral commands of the Counter-Reformation within a peculiar society of catholics and orthodoxes. At the same time, this gesture was an advantageous investment for his public image. In any case, the reputation which accompanies the donation, it could be transformed into power and influence. The organization of the hospital of the Sick Poor constitutes a typical example of the transition from traditional forms of charity towards medical philanthropy. In this case, however, in its operation could be detected, also, the need to be heard the discourse of a group of inhabitants of the city, excluded from the institutional political organs of the island. And although, initially, the area of the institution appears as a “region” of social co-existence of subjects of various social origins, during the last decades of the 18th c., in the field of its administration is expressed an informal process of internal realignment with protagonists individuals who belong to the social group civili at the expense of the cittadini. With these interpretative codes, its administration and its financial strengthening by private individuals does not constitute, exclusively, a philanthropic initiative for the medical care of the indigent poor. In some, at least, cases, it could be read as a political choice of members of specific social groups, as an action that implies the confl icts of the higher social strata and impresses vividly the re-negotiation of the social stratification. The above discovery does not negate even in this case the role of the hospital as a means of care for the soul of the benefactors and the beneficiaries, and its operation as an area of piety, an unnegotiable dimension during that period.

The military hospitals, the hospital of the Sick Poor, the foundling hospital comprise three different chapters in the history of the hospital institutions of venetian Corfu. The fi rst appeared as places of rehabilitation of the biological dysfunctions of the soldier-organs of the venetian defense. The rational administration of the bodies would secure the sufficiency of military forces for the support and the reproduction of a specific mechanism. The second institution provided, also, exclusively medical services, although to an extremely limited number of indigent sick. Nevertheless, under its roof, for the first time in a civic hospital of venetian Levant, the main prerequisite for the admission of a patient was the disease and not the poverty, even if this observation concerns only two registered cases. In contrast, the Ospedale della Pieta operated exclusively as a place of protection and education of the foundlings of the island, expressing one more aspect of the function of the hospital institutions, completely compatible with meaning of the term hospital during the period under examination. The diff erent roles that each one of these institutions was called to serve, make clear their complex identity during the early modern period. The single common characteristic of all three was the concern for the salvation of the soul of patients and inmates, as the main expression of redeeming philanthropy in the echo of the catholic Reformation, as it was being experienced in a particular environment of mixed religious identities.

The metaphysical, however, dimension of hospital care and the presence of clergymen within the institutions did not entail the involvement of the Church in their organization and administration. Moreover, the detachment of the venetian State from the ecclesiastic mechanism in the specific field of the hospital institutions had at times been expressed also through legislative activity. Th e two of the three institutions were public had a public nature: the operation of the military one was the responsibility of the Venetian government, while the administration of the foundling hospital was the responsibility of the civic Council. In contrast, the hospital of the Sick Poor was founded and survived due to private initiative. These hospitals continued their operation until the end of the venetian dominance, without the issue of their merging ever having been put forward by the venetian Authority, with the aim the centralized confrontation of the phenomenon of poverty and disease. This solution fervently wished and preferred the cittadini, as it ensues from their relevant report, during the last quarter of the 18th c., towards the government of the lagoon for the organization of a large institution of confinement in the city of Corfu. However, the corfiot environment of the period, as moreover the respective venetian, could not support either practically or morally the burden of such a development in the field of institutional policy.

EXAMINING THE COURSE of the three types of hospital establishments, one has the opportunity to fathom the history of the venetian dominance on the island, the terms and particular circumstances which it signified, the relations between the governing and the governed, the parallel powers, the social needs, the demands and the conflicts. These hospitals became incorporated in the urban tissue, occupying in the majority of cases a position on its periphery, “conversed” with the city and the country, served the needs of the dominant and the dominated, of the founders and the benefactors mainly, and to a minimal percentage of the poor and the indigent. Their foundation, however, was never connected with procedures of confinement and supervision of the indigent and the sick, nor did it ever evolve into a tool of their discipline. The hospitals of Corfou remained an area of traditional charity and medical practice, a place of care for the body and the soul of the patients and the inmates.