This working group is convened by the International Network for the History of Hospitals (INHH), which exists to promote studies related to the historical evolution of hospitals from their beginnings to the present day by providing an international forum for communication and discussion among scholars interested in the subject.
Our aim is to provide a platform to examine the various forms of "work" as it relates to the porous nature of hospitals, leprosaria, and similar assistive institutions. Hospitals are reductively seen as short-term care providers. In reality, they are dynamic spaces where the labors of the patients, staff, and even visitors creates community, identity, and purpose. We seek to analyze the intersection of caritive/curative work, the emotional and physical cost of labor which is often gendered, the enforcement of secular and canon laws, mental health and wellness, professional and public education, among others. All of this "work" goes into preserving their history with compassion and accuracy.
The INHH welcomes presenters from any career stage and discipline, including those working in preservation, museums, and independent scholars.
Group Conveners
John Henderson
John Henderson is a social and medical historian of renaissance and early modern Italy. His books include Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City (2019); Plague and the City, edited with Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynteris (2019); and Representing Infirmity: Diseased Bodies in Renaissance Italy, edited with Fredrika Jacobs and Jonathan K. Nelson (2021). He is also the author of Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (1994); The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe, with Jon Arrizabalaga and Roger French (1997); and The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul (2006). Most recently he has published The French Disease in Renaissance Italy. Representation and Experience (2024); and Medical Theory and Practice in Early Modern Italy, co-edited with Sandra Cavallo (2025).
Anna Peterson
Anna M. Peterson is an independent researcher whose work focuses on corruption and accountability in hospitals and leprosaria, especially in southwestern Europe, and the healthscaping policies of religious and secular authorities. Additionally, she also studies the social and cultural perceptions of leprosy and its sufferers in the Middle Ages. She is currently a working member for the project Mujeres y Culturas de la Belleza: de Trota de Salerno a Marie Meurdrac/Women's Beauty Cultures: from Trota of Salerno to Marie Meurdrac (WOMENSBEAUT) (PID2024-159676NB-I00), with Prof. Montserrat Cabré (Universidade de Cantabria).
In 2017, she was awarded her PhD in medieval history from the University of St Andrews. Her thesis, ‘A Comparative Study of the Hospitals and Leprosaria in Narbonne, France and Siena, Italy (1080-1348),’ analyses the development of assistive institutions in these cities, focusing on their relationship with religious and secular bodies as well as responses to corruption. She was awarded a Mellon Fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto) from 2018-2019. She is also the co-founder of Leprosy and the ‘Leper’ Reconsidered. Recently, she has written a study of language and the ‘construction’ of the leper in municipal and legal texts in Leprosy and Identity in the Middle Ages (2021) and co-authored a chapter on healthscaping in Siena in Disease and the Environment in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (2022). She is currently the Vice-President of Medica: the Society for the Study of Healing in the Middle Ages, as well as a co-editor of the book series Medica: Studies in Pre-Modern Health and Healing (Routledge).