The old custom of placing alms in a hollow tree
trunk inspired the Pistoia legend that tells of a pious couple,
Antimo and Bandinelia, who in the late 1200s saw an apparition of
the Virgin Mary who instructed them to found a hospital in the place
where they would find a trunk flowering in the dead of winter. Hence
the name and symbol of the Pistoian welfare institution whose duties
included helping the poor and curing the sick. Because of the role
they played in society, the Ospedale and similar institutions served
an essential function in the city especially during the frequent
calamities that afflicted Medieval society.
The hospital was at first just one of several institutions making
up the city's health system but it was to become, especially during
the terrible plague year narrated by Boccaccio, the most powerful
welfare organization in Pistoia, thanks also to the estates and
donations that it received. Confirmation of this prestige can be
seen in the fact that in the late 1400s the Ospedale became the
object of bitter fighting between opposing factions led by the noble
Panciatichi(
vs14) and Cancellieri
families of Pistoia who were vying for the hospital's top administration
post. Inevitably, Florence intervened to reconcile the two factions
and placed the hospital under the administration of the Ospedale
di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. In the meantime, the modest Medieval
rooms of the Pistoian institution had been enlarged and the colonnade
facing onto the piazza was added. (Thus the building took on the
architectural elements of Brunelleschi's style which can be seen
in the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence.) The polychrome frieze(
vs17)
over the portico was commissioned by the Administrator Leonardo
Buonafede in order to promote the hospital's charitable goals and
to propagandize the new Florentine management. The Ceppo became,
presumably in the 1500s, the seat of a medical school (
vi)
that over the centuries trained good doctors, among whom the anatomist
pathologist Filippo Pacini for whom the nearby street is named.
Remnants of the school are found today in the collection of ancient
medical instruments displayed in the Museo dell'Accademia Medica
del Ceppo.
Managed by the Santa Maria Nuova Administrators, the hospital grew
until it took over other similar institutions. At the end of the
1700s it became the city hospital, a function it still serves today.
(n.) refers to the number of the file-card (s.i.) means see information
inside
In the second panel of the frieze (
vs17),
in a scene dedicated to the Curing of the Sick, a doctor and a surgeon
are attended in their healing by nurses and students. The latter
would seem proof of medical instruction at the hospital as early
as the 1500s. The Scuola Medica del Ceppo, really documented only
from the late 1600s, prospered in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries when most of the old medical instruments conserved in
the museum were in use. Forceps, scalpels, cauteries and other instruments
tell the history of medicine and show how much it has perfected
its techniques over the course of time, aiming at ever better health
care. The museum also preserves medical texts as well as fragments
of glazed terracotta that were part of Santi Buglioni's composition
for the last frieze panel. A small hall for anatomical studies,
built in the garden at the end of the 1700s, also proves the vitality
of the Ospedale's medical school whose historical evidence has been
collected by the Accademia Pacini. The Museum and Anatomical Room
can be visited by request.
