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During the Middle Ages the hospital network in Western Europe reached an extraordinary development. In the case of Seville this hospital expansion was very prominent, since the late fifteenth century had more than a hundred centres. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how the Sevillian secular clergy controlled hospital care in a very prominent way in the city of the Betis river. This translated into a prominent role in the religious nature of Sevillian hospitals, despite the presence of professionals linked to medicine within de hospital staff. In this way the Church of late medieval Seville instrumentalized the assistance needs as an element of its empowerment in the cuty what was to become the port and the gate way to the Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Πόνημα ἰατρικόν by Michael Psellos is a didactic poem on medicine. The work, as it has been preserved until today, lacks a programmatic prologue, nevertheless, in a brief passage, introduced between verses 531-537, the author states that his intention is not to gather everything about this discipline, but to stir up the appetite for it in his learned friends using the charm of the verses. Taking into account the intentions expressed by the author himself, our aim is to analyze, by comparing and contrasting the poem with its sources (Paul of Aegina, Theophilus Protospatharius and Palladius of Alexandria), what kind of medical contents he selects from these sources and how he adapts and uses them, in order to verify how Psellos' purpose is fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]