Today's hospital is to medicine as the cathedral is to religion.
Roy Porter in Blood and Guts. A short history of Medicine.
We know hospitals as the sites where modern medical care is at its most advanced and complex, and its most expensive.
But it was not always so. Medicine initially made do entirely without hospitals. In ancient cultures religion and medicine were inextricably linked and
temples and shrines were the places to which people made pilgrimages to be healed and cured.
The advent of Christianity began an expansion of care for those who were ill or injured, including the construction of hospitals, but they were often regarded with suspicion even dread.
Have we come full circle with this belief?
Do we believe that our modern hospitals pose a risk to their patients?