In the first session, which examined the finances and patronage of hospitals, papers by Matthew Sneider and Marina Garbellotti outlined the strategies used by institutions to accumulate and to control valuable assets. The relative success (or failure) of such management, and the resulting inequalities in health care provision, formed the focus of a subsequent presentation by John Welshman. Gunnar Stollberg pointed out that internal differentiation in nineteenth-century hospitals in Munich and Leipzig was caused in part by a need to distinguish between patients of differing financial status.

The urban and rural topography of hospitals was tackled in four papers by Max Satchell, Christine Stevenson, Sergio Onger, and Annmarie Adams. The necessity of adopting a truly interdisciplinary approach, and the richness of source material, were stressed in this session. Delegates’ attention was drawn, for example, to variations in landscape as a factor in the choice of location of medieval hospitals, while the next paper (Stevenson) examined topographical representations of eighteenth-century British hospitals through maps and prints.

In what the presiede, John Henderson, referred to as perhaps "the most original session", Louise Gray, Eric E. Gruber von Arni and Flurin Condrau considered the patients’ experience in early modern Germany, seventeenth-century England and twentieth-century Britain and Germany. Louise Gray drew upon petitions made by the rural poor for entry into the hospital at Hesse to give a fascinating insight into prospective patients’ own perceptions of their disability and their requirements. The regime of care and rehabilitation offered in the Savoy, London, and at Ely House to sick and wounded soldiers during the English Civil War and the Interregnum was discussed by Eric E. Gruber von Arni, who noted that care did not necessarily cease once the soldier no longer required institutional support. The patient’s transition from hospital to home was also examined by Flurin Condrau. His case study of a German worker who disregarded medical advice and returned to his old job upon dismissal from a TB hospital highlighted the economic and social impact as well as the personal cost of illness.

On the final day of the conference, attention turned to the economic and demographic impact of hospitals on the wider community. In two contrasting papers, Alysa Levene considered how care in eighteenth-century Florentine and London foundling hospitals influenced nursing practice in the parish, while Andrea Turner gave a detailed account of the methodological difficulties of charting the impact of hospitals on mortality levels in London. Diego Ramiro-Farinas and Marco Geddes da Filicaia expanded upon the themes of mortality rates and "patient throughput" in Spanish and Italian hospitals.

The Herculean task of adding up the balance sheet fell to John Henderson and Alessandro Pastore, who commented upon the wealth of available sources for the study of the history of hospitals. The recurring themes emerging from the papers were summarised as diversity, the growth of specialised institutions (and specialisms within establishments), and the centralisation of resources. The "adaptation and mutation" of hospitals was also noted, as was the way in which they influenced each other (as with the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and the Savoy in London). Potential problems in comparative studies of hospitals in different countries and centuries were considered the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and but the need for such comparisons was reiterated. The INHH’s second conference was highly successful and continued the excellent standards set in the previous one: the third, to be held in 2003, is eagerly anticipated.