Some wives and mothers, especially in rural areas where trained medical personnel were in short supply, developed considerably specialized expertise, particularly after 1500, when the printing press began to render accessible medical knowledge previously restricted to professional physicians. Taking advantage of this new technology, some wealthy women even compiled their own medical libraries and private recipe collections. The Elizabethan gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay, for example, received some education from her governess in herbal and astrological medicine, as well as minor surgery; she supplemented this by consulting doctors and other acquaintances and by reading in various vernacular medical books, and she developed an impressive repertoire of remedies, both herbal and chemical, which she documented in a series of manuscripts, manufactured in large quantities, and used to treat her own family and needy tenants, as well as dependants.

In addition to domestic medicine, people received health care at home from other practitioners--midwives as well as physicians and surgeons--who made house calls. As early as the fourteenth century, however, in many European cities, physicians also saw patients in the context of clinics held in the shops of apothecaries, with whom they had regular contractual arrangements. There, they examined ambulatory patients, diagnosed their illness, and made out prescriptions. Like apothecaries, who provided medical advice as well as selling remedies, some surgeons also maintained their own shops, where they stored the special tools and instruments required by their work. Like the contracts that often governed the relationships between doctor and patient in the Renaissance period, formally specifying each party's obligations, the importance of shop-based practices testifies to the gradualness with which medicine evolved from a craft to a learned profession.

In addition to the more traditional sites represented by shops and private homes, the Renaissance saw the emergence and elaboration of a third, largely new, site of health care: urban hospitals, which were founded by princes and patricians as charitable institutions, intended to provide a range of free services, including medical services, to the poor. Although the first such hospitals were medieval foundations, established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was not until the mid-fourteenth century that some of these became exclusively devoted to treating the sick. At the same time, others began to combine specialized care of the sick with such activities as raising orphans, maintaining old and disabled workers, and lodging pilgrims and travellers. Some of the earliest and most highly developed of these hospitals were in the cities of central or northern Italy. Among the most famous were the Ospedale Maggiore in Milan, designed by the celebrated architect Filarete for Duke Francesco Sforza, and the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, founded by Folco Portinari, father of Dante's Beatrice. The latter had its own fully staffed pharmacy, which dispensed medicines both to its hundreds of in-patients and to friends and relatives of poor people who were sick at home. In addition, it salaried a growing number of physicians and surgeons; some of these resided in the hospital, while others made daily visits to supervise the care of the patients. The fame of Santa Maria Nuova had become so great by the early sixteenth century that Henry VII of England took it as the model for his own hospital, the Savoy. . .

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