Throughout the survey of charitable foundations in medieval Cambridgeshire a diverse picture of forms and activities has emerged. Their complex and flexible character can be appreciated further from the structure and orientation of their institutional lives and services. Therefore, we turn now to the urban hospital of Cambridge for a study in depth of one such institution bearing in mind that its character reflected changes in society's attitudes towards and expectations of a house of mercy.

HOSPITALS AND THE ATTITUDES

TOWARDS PHYSICAL HEALING

Pauper et infirmus is the commonplace description of those intended to benefit from charitable giving. Some sick people were necessarily poor, not only through their loss of working capacity, but, as in the case of lepers, through being prohibited from holding property. Some types of sickness were seen as punishment for sin, and imposed on the sick a double stigma. Yet it is usually in vain that one searches for medical orientation in the activities of institutions devised for the relief of the sick and poor. Although medicine was studied in medieval universities, on a practical level healing was not seen primarily as a purely physical transformation; if sickness was caused by sin, it was to be remedied by conquering sin. A wide range of measures was taken to induce spiritual healing, traditional practices were employed and expected to work transformations in the patient's psyche. The formal dichotomy of medicine/healing is manifested in twelfth- and thirteenth-century synodal legislation which reiterated the need for spiritual balm to counteract the sinful state which causes physical ailment, a view clearly stated in the Decretum, ‘contraria sunt divine conditioni precepta medicine’ (‘the principles of medicine are contrary to divine command’).