Medical Provision in the Convents of Poor Clares in Late-eighteenth-century Hungary
Medical Provision in the Convents of Poor Clares in Late-eighteenth-century Hungary

Summary/Abstract: The article sets into focus the everyday practices of caring the sick in the Poor Clares’ convents of Bratislava, Trnava, Zagreb, Buda and Pest with a time scope focused on the era of Maria Theresa’s and Joseph II’s church reforms. It evinces that each convent had an infirmary, in which the ill nuns could be separated from the rest of the community and nursed according to the instructions of a doctor, but the investigation of the rooms and their equipment also reveals significant differences among them. While the infirmary was merely a sickroom with three or four beds in the case of the smaller communities of Zagreb and Pest, the bigger convents’ infirmaries  – that accommodated nine-twelve patients – consisted of a complex set of interconnected spaces with various functions, including storage rooms, cooking facilities and places for making medicine. The infirmary chapels of Bratislava and Trnava and the liturgical equipment in the bigger, hall-like sickroom in Buda represent the interconnectedness of spiritual and medical care. The study also sheds light on possible correlations between self-supply and services provided by external lay practitioners, as it presents the strategies of the convents to reduce medical expenses, e.g. by producing medicaments, accepting novices with surgical-apothecary knowledge or contracting surgeons and physicians for a  fixed annual salary. Finally, the paper points towards further research directions suggesting a more sophisticated analysis of the correlations between the nuns’ demand for proper medical care and their agency at the time of the abolition of their order in 1782.

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