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This hospital was founded in 1380 by Bonifazio Lupi for paupers and the disabled. Later, it became the field hospital for plague victims and for part of the eighteenth century it was a hospital for Spanish troops. From 1780, it accommodated the chronically and mentally ill. It played an acknowledged role in the development of surgical techniques and medical training. In 1805 Vincenzo Chiarugi became the first professor of dermatology and psychiatry in Pisa and concurrently the first mental health specialist to be appointed at Bonifazio. In 1840, the hospital established Florence’s first chair in mental diseases, thereby adding to the specialities (such as anatomy, pathology, psychiatry and obstetrics) already taught there. All Florence’s psychiatric patients were treated at Bonifazio until the end of the nineteenth century, when the Ospedale Psichiatrico di San Salvi was opened.
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