The infirmary was a separate house within the monastery, planned from the beginning as a world of its own. The clearest picture of it comes from an ideal plan of a monastery drawn in the ninth century: a large sheet of parchment showing every building a great abbey might need, from church and cloister to barns, workshops, and gardens. On that plan the care of the sick is not a room tucked into a corner. It is a complete group of buildings with its own name and its own order.

The plan places the infirmary on the east side of the monastery, beyond the church and away from the main cloister where the healthy monks lived, prayed, and worked. Its buildings are gathered around a small cloister of their own. There is a dormitory for the sick and a room for those most gravely ill. There is a room for the brother in charge. There is a kitchen of its own, so that the meals of the sick need not wait on the kitchen of the community, and a bath of its own, so that the baths the rule allowed them could be given without disturbing the rest of the house.

At the center stands a chapel. On the plan the infirmary shares its church with the novices, the two halves of the building set back to back, each with its own cloister. The meaning of this chapel is simple: the sick were not to be cut off from the prayer of the monastery. Unable to stand in choir with the community, they could still hear Mass and take part in the Divine Office from their own side of the house. Illness removed a monk from the work of the community, but not from its worship.

Close by, the plan draws the herb garden: a small walled plot divided into beds, each labeled with the name of a plant. Its nearness mattered. What grew there was not a crop for sale but part of the daily round of the sick house—gathered, dried, and prepared a few steps from the rooms where it would be used. The garden belonged to the infirmary as surely as the chapel did.

The plan also shows a house for bloodletting, where the monks went at set intervals according to the customs of the time and rested afterwards with lighter duties and better food. And it shows, standing apart, a house for the physician, with a room for his supplies and a room for those who were acutely ill. The herb garden lies beside it.

That separate house is one of the most telling details on the whole plan. The physician did not live in the infirmarian’s room, and the infirmarian did not live in the physician’s house. They were different people with different callings. The infirmarian was a monk of the community, appointed by the abbot to serve the sick in prayer and daily care. The physician was a man of a learned art, called upon for the knowledge that the infirmarian did not claim. The buildings themselves drew the line that this site draws in words.

Seen as a whole, the plan teaches a way of thinking about the sick. They are given quiet, apart from the noise of the working house. They are given a church, so that they remain within the prayer of the community. They are given a kitchen, a bath, and a garden, so that daily life can be ordered around their needs. And they are given two kinds of help, kept distinct: the brother who stays with them, and the physician who is called.

At IHS Bethlehem Church, we keep the infirmary not as a building but as five works: prayer, company at the bedside, the rule of life, the herb garden, and consolation through the arts. Each answers to a part of the plan—the chapel, the brother’s room, the kitchen and bath, the garden, and the songs and books of the house. Our sanctuary is a chapel for prayer, not a house for the sick. If the corporation one day has rooms in which to receive the sick, they will be arranged after the pattern of this plan: a place of prayer at the center, quiet rooms around it, the herb garden close at hand, and the physician’s work left to the physician.