Remedies used in Byzantine hospitals: the Xenonic texts

Scholars have made conflicting claims for Byzantine hospitals as medical institutions and as the forebears of the modern hospital.

In this study is the first systematic examination of the evidence of the xenon texts, or Xenonika, on which all such claims must in part rest.

These texts, compiled broadly between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, are also transcribed or edited, with the exception of the combined texts of Romanos and Theophilos that, the study proposes, were originally a single manual and teaching work for doctors, probably based on xenon practice.

A schema (App. III) of their combined chapter headings sets out the unified structure of this text.

A short handlist briefly describes the principal manuscripts referred to throughout the study.