By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Perez et al. (2012) note, this idea of a hospital was borrowed into the Islamic world where they developed along a different trajectory than the institutions did in Europe. Some were designed merely to succour the local cenobites, while others were open to the public.Īs Perez et al. These early hospitals, Horden explains, were built by Churchmen such as Basil of Caesarea and St. Peregrine Horden (2005), an important historian of hospitals and Western medicine has noted that the earliest hospitals known to have been constructed were built by the clergy of the early fourth century, coinciding with the legalisation and nationalisation of the Church. (2007) Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations: Portraits Of Individuals With Disabilities In Star Trek. Although representations of people with disabilities have not been perfect in either medieval or modern media, the belief that those who are infirm should not be killed as infants will remain constant.Īlthough this monumental shift in European understandings of personhood occurred well before the medieval period is typically considered to have begun, it is essential that it be discussed because the teachings of the early Church formed the cosmological, ontological, and theological framework upon which all later thinking would be based, even down to the present. This fundamental shift in the understanding of personhood and the rights inherent thereto will underscore everything that follows. Unlike in pagan Rome, the Church, when it came to power, had an approach which disallowed infanticide. This is a landmark in properly understanding how people with disabilities were viewed in the world. And as the famous second century Christian author Justin Martyr commented in his opus First Apology, Christians “have been taught that to expose newly born children is the part of wicked men, lest we should do anyone an injury and lest we should sin against God” (Leeson, 2008).
If a Christian woman was married to a pagan and a girl baby was born, the father might say, “Throw her out,” but the mother would usually refuse (40).Ī first century Christian moral text known as The Didache or The Teaching Of The Twelve Apostles (although it was not actually written by them) (Gonzalez, 2010), also takes time and precious writing materials to note that “you shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born” (Stinton, 2008). Unlike his pagan neighbor the Christian refused to take his weak and unwanted children out in the woods and leave them to die or be picked up by robbers. As esteemed scholar Bruce Shelley (2008) notes: As the primitive Church developed in the first to fourth century it had a distinctive valuation of human life and this had a direct effect upon the treatment of children born with disabilities.