The Founding of the Hospitaller and Service Activities: Focused on the Hospitals and the Social Welfare

The Hospital of St. John of the Hospitaller began in the 1070s in Jerusalem. Gerard, the ruler of the Hospital at the time of the First Crusade(1095-99), was commemorated as a venerable and pious man who cared for poor pilgrims. The first statutes of the Jerusalem brotherhood, the Rule of Raymond du Puy, were influenced by the regula of other Augustinian houses. In the Statutes of Roger des Moulins(1182) it offered the services of doctors and surgeons, a specific diet, and the medicines available to medieval physicians. From Paris these regulations spread to other cities of northern France, bringing with them the hospital discipline oi the Knights of Saint John. In Germany, too, the late twelfth century marks a dramatic change in the orientation of hospices. The Hospital of the Knights in Jerusalem was a great edifice whose very size and whose location among the holy places helped to fire the religious sensibilities of Western Europeans. The Hospital admitted the poor, whatever their illness except leprosy, nationality, sex, or religion. The Hospitallers also became responsible for the burial not only of their patients but also of other visitors to Jerusalem. The Hospitallers had another function in the provision of board and lodging, death-care facilities and posthumous prayer to single persons or couples, secular people who purchased or contracted for various forms of life pension or annuity. By the end of the thirteenth century the responsibility for providing health care in Brussels was a concern not only of the nobility and the church but also of the everyday inhabitants of Brussels.