[Ospedale maggiore: why "maggiore"? Medical historiography and narrative tradition]

The history of the Trieste General Hospital (Ospedale Maggiore) is not the simple and straightforward story of a health institute. When the beginning of the 19th century drew the curtain on the era in which medicine was practiced in libraries or by scrutinising the patient at his bedside in isolation, the Ospedale Maggiore was the first grand civic sanitarium for this metropolis on the Austro-Hungarian coast, from which it became possible to engineer the anthropological transformation of its population into the mass society of the 20th century. In 1841, the new health institution swept away the mass of buildings that made up the previous Ospedale Civile on the san Giusto hill hospital complex (former Episcopio) and, over the next fifty years, provided the city with a class of medical practitioners and with a medicine founded on the same scientific cornerstones as that practised in Vienna and Paris.