Hospital services provided by the Catholic Church.
"The medical history of the Knights' original hospital in Jerusalem (1099) begins before 1306 and then it spreads to include successor hospitals at Acre, Cyprus, Rhodes, and finally Malta. In each of these locations, the Hospitaller Order quickly reestablished its renowned medical services, which included care provided by trained physicians and surgeons. It has been suggested that the prime reason for the Knights' interest in sustaining their hospital was to promote goodwill in the West—and yet, during their eight-year exile following the Turkish conquest of Rhodes (1522) the Hospitallers continued to offer medical care for the needy, even briefly on the beaches near Naples, before they finally secured a permanent home on Malta (1530). It would seem that at least some sincere Hospitallers saw their charitable tradition as an essential element of their vocation, and not simply as a tool to win support from European leaders.
"There is overwhelming evidence that many thirteenth-century hospices in Italy and France adopted rules for assisting their guests and patients that were clearly patterned on the regulations governing the care of the sick in the Jerusalem hospital. Hence, the Jerusalem hospital's highly medicalized treatment of the sick influenced subsequent developments in Western hospitals.
"A newly discovered description of the Jerusalem hospital dates from the 1170s. In 1989 an Austrian researcher, Berthold Waldstein-Wartenberg, reported that a manuscript in the Bavarian State Library contained a text with new information regarding the Knights' hospital. More recently, Benjamin Kedar published this anonymous document. In his introduction, Kedar stressed that it clearly refers to the Jerusalem hospital and includes a fascinating description of patient wards and of mobile clinics that the Knights maintained to assist warriors wounded in battle. This text also reveals that the Knights accepted Moslem and Jewish patients. Several explicit references in this anonymous document relate to the Jerusalem institution."
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bhm/sum...6.2miller.html
