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Biblioteca Pública Pilar Faus. Public library in the city of València (Valencian Country), located in the place that once was the first psychiatric hospital in Europe and one of the first ones in the world.
In the year 1409, the Valencian priest Joan Gilabert Jofré was walking to the Cathedral of València, where he had to give mass. On his way there, he saw a group of children mocking and hitting a mentally-ill boy, making fun of him calling him "crazy". Father Jofré stopped it, scolded the kids, and took the mentally-ill boy to the convent, where he could stay safe. Then, Father Jofré went back to the Cathedral and preached a sermon focused on the need for the city to establish a charitable institution to take care of and treat mentally-ill people and other outcasts. At the time, this was an unusual approach, because the Christian view said that people with psychological problems were possessed by the Devil. Luckily, Father Jofré's sermon was very well-received, and at the end of the mass 11 Valencians, including some from the most important families at the time like Llorenç Salom and Bernat Andreu, approached Jofré and offered to fund this new institution. They bought an area with houses and fields and founded the Hospital dels Innocents or Hospital dels Folls de València, inaugurated on June 9th 1409.
It is often considered the first time where an institution in a majority-Christian country treated people with psychological illnesses from the point of view of being people who are ill and need to be taken care of and cured, and not treated through exorcisms nor thought to be possessed. It was not only important for the medicine part of it, but also because it gave mentally-ill people a place to live and food, in a time period where otherwise they were very often beggars and lived in the streets. The Valencian Hospital was seen as a reference and many countries in Europe and Latin America created similar institutions based on it.
The hospital was successful and received the permission to build an expansion in 1493, but most of it burned down in a fire in 1547: the only element of the original Medieval building that still remains nowadays is the Gothic portal at the entrance. The rest of the hospital was rebuilt in Renaissance style as the General Hospital of València.
It was used as a hospital until 1962, when a modern building was created for it. The demolition of the old hospital started, but Valencian citizens organized to preserve the building. The old chemist's, the church, and the faculty of medicine that the University of València had built there were already demolished, but the organized citizens saved the sickroom building. Since 1979, the sickroom building hosts the Public Library Pilar Faus.
Photos from Wikimedia Commons and Ministerio de Cultura.
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