Valetudinarium

A valetudinarium (plural valetudinaria) was a permanent hospital built inside a Roman legionary fortress. That is the traditional reading of a particular building plan found at several sites. Some scholars question how confidently every such building can be identified as a hospital.

The best-known example is at Novaesium on the Rhine, excavated between 1887 and 1900. Similar plans, with variations, have been found at Bonna, Vindonissa, Lauriacum, Novae and Vetera. Several of these sites produced collections of surgical instruments. At Vindonissa, Museum Aargau identifies a large hospital built first in wood and later in stone.

At Novaesium, the building measures roughly 90 by 50 metres: a central colonnaded courtyard, two rows of paired wards on three sides, and a large hall on the fourth. Excavation recovered one of the largest finds of Roman medical tools, including scalpels and probes, and evidence of medicinal plants such as centaury, henbane and St John's wort.

Patricia Baker's work challenges how confidently these buildings can be read as hospitals. Our position: Roman forts include buildings long interpreted as hospitals, and scholars debate how much of their function and organisation can be reconstructed. They were not modern hospitals.

• Vindonissa (modern Windisch, Switzerland). Instruments found at the site support a medical presence. The large stone hospital belongs to a later phase than AD 35, so The Hands That Survived Rome does not show it.