Hospital Real de Todos os Santos: contributos para uma história da enfermagem

As the first major general hospital of the kingdom, the All-Saints Royal Hospital was an inevitable reference to those who, over the course of almost three centuries (1504-1775), sought in there the relief for diseases and loneliness, in its multiples aspects. The “hospital of the poor”, a basilar element of the D.
João II’s reform project in what concern to the assistance in Portugal, was also a structure with pedagogical School concerns. Despite its several difficulties, suggested by the literature, it ran the of Surgery and trained nurses.
In the present article we aim to understand the relationship between the All-Saints Royal Hospital and nursing, as a profession of caring, questioning its feminine and religious matrix, highlighting its importance in this institutional environment.