Healing the Whole Person

What we did know today was that we wanted to visit the Hospital of St. Pau. We knew it was built in the early twentieth century, and that it had been decommissioned in 2009, restored and made a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We also knew it is one of the foremost examples of modernist architecture in the world. That’s what we did know.

What we didn’t know was that when the hospital was decommissioned in 2009, it became a huge new medical center, also called the Hospital of St. Pau. We asked our cab driver to take us to the Hospital of St. Pau. And he did so, letting us out at a sprawling medical campus, with ambulances screaming to the emergency department in a gargantuan complex of buildings framed with modern stone, glass and steel.

Ooops! This was one of those little traveling mishaps. One must keep his sea legs on such days, so Glenda got instructions from two nice men wearing surgical scrubs outside the hospital entrance. They directed us to the opposite corner of the city block, where we found one of the most amazing healing centers in all of medical history.

In 1401 a group of noblemen and some local ecclesiastical groups formed a society to create a hospital for poor people. All people regardless of nationality, status or income could come to be treated. They called it La Hospital de la Santa Creu, the Hospital of the Holy Cross. For six hundred years it has used the best in medical knowledge and equipment to bring healing to the sick and peace to the dying.

At the turn of the century a group of forward-looking physicians contacted the famous architect Lluis Domènch i Montaner. They wanted him to build for them a hospital—but not just an ordinary surgical center. They wanted it to be beautiful. They wanted it to be filled with gardens full of orange trees and lavender. The walls were to be decorated with the finest art they could find. The staff called in orchestras to treat the patients to classical music, and later jazz. They believed that healing was as much a matter of healing the senses as of healing the body. So they wanted to treat their patients in the most beautiful place imaginable, with light and fragrance and beauty as part of their healing regime, with tunnels linking the twelve pavillions, each devoted to a separate medical discipline.

The major benefactor was a millionaire named Pau Gil y Serra, who was named for St. Paul, so they added his patron saint’s name to that of the hospital. Now it is technically called The Hospital de la Santa Creu i San Pau. The complex was constructed between 1902 and 1930, and gradually poor and indigent patients found wholeness here.

During the Spanish Civil War the hospital was commandeered by the government and renamed the Barcelona Medical Center. The abundant religious iconography on the campus was obscured by the Franco Regime. Afterwards, it resumed its original name and mission, and, in a separate new facility around the block, continues to do so today. It is still one of the leading medical centers in Europe. The first bone marrow transplant in Spain occurred here, and so did the first heart transplant.

I was moved today by the original mission of the founders of the Hospital of St. Pau. Most medical treatment carried out in hospitals today occurs in theaters that are sterile, spare, Spartan, and, well—clinical. I wonder how medicine would change if society became convinced that part of the healing process occurs simply by being surrounded by beauty.Read more