Hospital, hotel, hostel and host all grew from one Latin word
A hospital gathers specialized clinicians, equipment, and support staff to treat patients, and the power to admit people overnight is what sets it apart from a clinic. Yet the word began with guests, not patients: medieval hospitals sheltered pilgrims and the poor long before surgery moved in.
The root is Latin hospes, a stranger and therefore a guest. From it came hospitium, the bond between guest and shelterer, and later a word for lodgings or an inn. English host, hospitality, hospice, hostel and hotel all descend from it; hotel came through Old French hostel, whose lost s survives as the circumflex in modern French hôtel. In the Middle Ages hospitals were almshouses for the poor, hostels for pilgrims or schools, and London's Royal Hospital Chelsea, founded in 1681 as a home for old soldiers, still carries that older sense.
Christian religious orders and charitable patrons founded and funded many early hospitals, and their members or volunteers did the nursing. Some still do: the Alexian brothers and the Bon Secours nuns, both Catholic, remained devoted to hospital work into the late 1990s, and Lutherans and Methodists run hospitals too. Today most are paid for by governments, insurers, for-profit or nonprofit health organisations and donations, and staffed by professional doctors, nurses and allied workers.
The familiar model is the general or acute-care hospital with an emergency department for accidents and sudden illness; in the United States and Canada some run their own ambulances. Teaching hospitals add students and residents, while big medical centres often act as headquarters for multi-site systems. In California, district hospitals created after World War II to ease bed shortages are the only public hospitals in 19 counties and provided $54 million in unpaid care in 2012.
Specialist hospitals, from children's and psychiatric units to cancer and cardiac centres, can cut costs. Narayana Health's cardiac hospital in Bangalore has 3,000 beds and performs about 3,000 children's heart operations a year, the most of any such facility. Paying surgeons fixed salaries rather than fees per operation lets it spread costs across ever more procedures, almost like a production line.
Source: Hospital
